Shall Shine the Holy Glimmers of Goodbyes
by CBK1000
Summary: Final entry in an ongoing AU Originals series. Klaroline
1. Part One

**A/N: Hello, and welcome to the final one-shot in this series. Yes, you read that correctly- WE'RE HERE, BITCHES. PRAISE THE LORD AT LONG LAST THE END IS NIGH. Now, we still have to keep this in perspective- it's me, so this last fic will probably be, oh, approximately 12 million words long. So if you're not ready for the series to be over, sigh a little in relief and think about how many ridiculous updates you still have coming your way. If you think I have dragged this out way too long but you're still here because Klaroline or gay sex or these bitchin' author's notes, sigh a little in exasperation, pinch the bridge of your nose, and maybe get a drink.**

 **The title is from Wilfred Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', one of my favorite poems.**

 **Rebekah is dancing in Giselle; my descriptions are based on the Royal Ballet version. I picked through an inordinate amount of the internet trying to get a timeline of which ballets might have been performed in 1916 Russia and pretty much came up with shit all, so I settled on Giselle because it is an awesome ballet, and also because it was first performed in 1841 and the choreography we see today was staged by Marius Petipa during the late 1800s/early 1900s in St. Petersburg (here named as Petrograd; the name was changed during WWI because St. Petersburg was felt to be too German), so since the Russians were responsible for its revival, I figured it was a pretty decent choice. Also, my sister may have rolled her eyes and said I was being way too much of an anal freak about trying to hunt down exact dates on early 19th century ballet performances and to just goddamned pick one.**

 **The play Kol is 'auditioning' for is Julius Caesar.**

 **Also, shout out to Cindy, my favorite engineer, for the many IM conversations re: our Enzo headcanons (and most importantly: our Enzo/Klaus headcanons).**

 **Let's kick this off.**

* * *

 **2014, Cairo**

He looks well-fed, and handsome, does Nik. The systematic oppression of the masses always did perform wonders for his complexion.

The sun, in its most dramatic throes, touches one of the fortress' turrets, and for a moment suffers Christ-like impalement; it oozes slowly down the mortar into the water. On Nik's head, the remains of it relax in a temporary coronation.

He puts his numb hands in his pockets.

He could say something snappy: he could do that. To what do I owe the pleasure, darling; and the players assume once more their cues, and all is right with his brother's smile.

From here, his brother's heartbeat is audible. It beats not dissimilarly to his human homecomings, when with fresh-salted beard, and newly-pinked sword he'd brace for a moment before the arms came open: one day, you could see on his face, father is going to win, and the younger brother who circles him as any body orbits its sun will look, and see, and turn away.

You could almost say he's regretful.

You could almost say he's frightened.

Nik, Nik, Nik, he thinks, not with derision.

He's tired.

He's waited too long.

He is, he thinks, at long and painful last, done.

Nik steps forward.

He turns round, and walks off into the sunset.

* * *

Kol lets himself into her hotel room while she is idly perusing some magazine or another she nicked from Caroline's room; she has hardly noted the cover of it.

She turns three pages, very leisurely, before she deigns to notice him.

He looks terrible.

You can see, for perhaps the first time, he isn't nineteen at all: there is dust and death on his shoulders. The eyes are bagged as though he has for each of his thousand years suffered every mortal affliction and the body has with clock-like stubbornness merely ticked on. There are at least three days of stubble on the face which generally he shaves smooth; she suspects his boyfriend prefers it that way.

He sits down on the edge of her bed.

She has for long enough toiled this mortal coil to know when a moment is one which is destined for the schoolbooks and when it is simply another of Time's belt notches.

There's something denser about it: the precise slump of his shoulders and the duck of his head and the shush of the air through his nostrils which ought not to sound any differently than normal but has, indeed, an unusual resonance.

The magazine shivers in her hands.

Through the hotel window, Alexandria begins to live in a way which a city does not truly know till the sky has shut itself off like a snuffed lamp and from the shops and the cars and the barges which litter the river blaze artificial sunrise; the curtains are briefly displaced by a fleeting breeze.

"I don't want to be a part of this family anymore," Kol tells her.

She smooths the pages in her hands, and lifts her chin loftily. "Welcome to my world. You'll get over it."

But he turns to her with his bloodshot eyes and the bangs in disarray on his suddenly lined forehead and oh, Nik what have we done to him, she wants to know: you cannot save that many pieces for yourself and expect forever unending reserves.

She's forgotten how to reach him.

So he runs his hand over his face alone, he says, "Nik's here", he says: "I think it's too late, Bekah."

He was waiting, you see.

And you just-

He doesn't need to finish that.

"You're not serious, Kol," she says in her meanest voice, because she knows he is. "You never are."

"You're right," he replies hoarsely, and smiles the way a dying man might. "That's me, darling."

She closes the magazine slowly.

He lowers his eyes, so she can see just the thick lashes tipped in chestnut, and she remembers how he did that when a thousand years ago that little cow stomped his poor human heart and he couldn't let you see it, because it wasn't his lot to be sad.

Some men are natural jesters, Nik said once, and ruffled his hair affectionately. They are not made to feel life profoundly, as his lesser contemporaries suffer it; for him there is but shallow comprehension, and superficial passions.

"I'm tired. Can I stay here for the night?" he asks, and she reaches out to touch his hair and something in his face shifts and she thinks he's going to cry, but of course he doesn't- of course he doesn't, not Kol, to whom that right never belonged, he just lays his head down in her lap like he's given up.

* * *

Tim finds him in one of the Montazah Palace's alcoves two, perhaps three days later, morosely sighing over what mediocrity he has managed to fish out of the abysmal depths of this twenty-first century cesspit of illiteracy.

Shakespeare was, himself, an uneducated nonentity, peddling to the masses; and still his pen managed a staggering oeuvre yet to be replicated. And the masses of today, darlings, cannot even manage an unmangled recitation of his tamed first folios, gently dumbed by accommodating scholars.

Tim takes the cigarette packet out of his pocket, and taps it twice on his palm; the cigarette he shakes loose is inserted slowly between his lips, and not lit. In the mute language of a man who lets most others do the talking for him, it means he understands the delicacy of the moment, and the layer which is underneath his smile. Roughly, in Tim Speak: Sorry you're hurting, lad. I'll just tiptoe round it, then, if your dignity is all you've left.

"Klaus is back, then," he says rather than asks, and takes out his lighter.

"Yes."

"Do you want to leave?"

"No. Do you?" He doesn't look away from his 'actors'.

"Ah. Nah. I said I didn't want him to have that sort of control." He offers the cigarette.

"That's a crap brand, darling. No thanks. I have better taste."

"Ah, well, fuck yourself." He blows a long ring toward the gardens. "Have you been here the whole time?"

"How else am I supposed to whip them into shape? It's quite the process, let me tell you." He gestures with his hand to one of the men lined up before him. "From the top, darling."

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears," the most promising of them begins.

He leans back against the railing beside Tim, who presses their shoulders companionably together.

"I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones; so let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus hath told you that Caesar was ambitious; if it were so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath Caesar answer'd it."

He wrinkles his nose; the man fumbles the next line.

"No," he says, and seizing him by the throat, tosses him over the railing; his broken neck ends his scream.

"Jaysus, that was awful," Tim says, flicking his cigarette after the man. He thrills just a little at that distortion of Christ's name; he remembers how it crept round beneath that lousy American accent, and from time to time reared itself when he was particularly worked up in either bed or anger, and you could hardly from that international muddle parse what he was saying.

If he were to confess that he finds the poor grammar Elijah despises, and the slangy brogue at which Rebekah sneers (colloquialism is, after all, a mark of the peasantry) rather cute, he would appreciate the confidence such sentimentality begs.

You don't know how it might be used against him.

He throws up his hands. "I can't get Antony cast. I'm going to have to start all over. He's the absolute hinge upon which this play swings, let me tell you, darling."

"Well, let me propose something less frustrating. How about you come to the club, and we'll have ourselves a night? I'll even drink enough to dance in public. On me mother's grave."

He leans into Tim's shoulder, cocking his head at the three remaining men from which, let's be honest, he's not going to wring a performance approaching even the lowest barrel bottom of acceptable. "That's a fine line, darling. If I don't get you drunk enough, you'll sit at the bar and laugh at me. If I get you too drunk, you'll be preoccupied with giggling."

"Ah, come on. Could we call it something else? Manly guffawing. The fuck-it chortling of a warrior making his final charge."

"Well, it's not any of those things, I'm afraid to say. It's very…what's the word…ah, yes. Womanish."

"Do you have to poke at me frail masculinity?"

He smiles sideways at Tim, and motions the three men forward. "Yes." And to the men: "Jump off the railing, please. I can't be bothered with you anymore."

They land noisily; one does not die upon impact, and in garbled Arabic begins to shriek about his immeasurable pain. It's rather annoying.

Tim looks at him with a sigh, and leans over the railing to finish him off with his pistol. "What do you say?"

He looks down at his hands, pursing his lips. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches as the breeze dishevels that tuft of hair which is ever present beneath Tim's cap.

"On your mother's grave, Timothy," he says, sternly.

* * *

Tim keeps his word.

Someone puts on 'Ballroom Blitz', and he whirls Tim through a hyperactive approximate of the lindy which destroys three tables and one unfortunate couch, but management is not terribly arsed about it; he assumes a vampire clientele has never been particularly sympathetic to the décor.

Tim is laughing so hard he nearly falls over, but when they unclasp hands he does mirror him reasonably well; they acquit themselves like coordinated morons, grab for one another again, and Tim spins him twice under his arm, which is far easier than trying to get his own arm over Ireland's own lanky Goliath.

Caroline is thrown into the mix by Enzo, who tosses her with a screech to him; he catches her round the waist, and spins her twice. Tim and Enzo wildly spin and dip one another; Tim's hat is sacrificed to this drunken carousing, but rescued by Caroline, who wears it for her solo. It's a new style, he assumes, not terribly innovative, or in much necessity of actual skill, but it does involve particular emphasis on her very nice ass, which thrusts back and forth with no concern for rhythm whatsoever.

"It's called booty popping!" she yells over the music, and tries to show Tim how to do it.

"No, no, no, no," he laughs, staggering back with a shake of his head. "I'm not doing that."

"You promised to make a jackass of yourself, darling," he points out.

"And I've done that," Tim insists, pointing at him; his depth perception has been slightly compromised by the alcohol he never has been able to carry very well, and he nearly has his eye put out. "I've well fulfilled me end of the bargain, Kol Mikaelson."

He pulls Tim closer by the finger. "You can never make too much of a jackass out of yourself, in this age of instant youtube gratification."

"Fuck you, anyway. I've already one embarrassing video floating round the internet." Tim tries to kiss his nose; he shuts his eyes so the inebriated lips graze lid rather than ball.

"You idiot," he says, and his fondness for a moment seals his throat, and because the dumb smile they share gathers in him this hard knot of sudden nerves and there is inside him the brimming over of things he is not often allowed and only half understands, he breaks the moment by seizing Tim's hands and jolting him through a dizzying reenactment of the third class dance from _Titanic_. Tim is, of course, on account of his indignant hatred, made to dance Leonardo DiCaprio's role; they level three other couples who are only foundlings anyway, and could be shattered at a blow from Tim's pinkie, so there's hardly any concern over the resultant brawl.

They have to nearly carry one another back to the hotel, and keep stopping to kiss in between bouts of pissed laughter, which shocks passersby into momentary statuary. It is all mostly uncoordinated spit at this point; Tim finds this hysterical, and, after wiping drool from the dimple in his chin, smears it across his mouth, working it in heartily.

He bites Tim's hand.

They destroy, as far as he can recall, at least one building corner with a playful shoving match; he is afterward conveyed to the hotel by piggyback, Tim loping diagonally toward the hotel and by a wide foot missing the front door upon his first attempt at entry.

"You've got to- you've got to turn sideways," he squeezes out in between laughs.

"What? Have you got fatter, all of a sudden?" Tim demands, bouncing him, but obliging, and trying to navigate by his peripheral vision as they stagger inside and he attempts the stairs sideways, nearly falling.

"No. I just wanted to see you be an absolute jackass about it," he says, and leans out to wrap his arm round the banister of the staircase, just to fuck with Tim.

Tim yanks; the banister creaks menacingly, and splinters. "Ohohohohohohoh, _fook_!" Tim yells, his drunken laughter awkwardly stuttering the first word. " _Fuck_!" he yells again, and staggers into the wall.

The manager appears at the bottom of the stairs to smile painfully, and to convey, in his nearly perfect English and his politest tone, that the other guests would prefer their two a.m. slumber blissfully uninterrupted.

"Sorry; sorry," Tim apologizes, too loudly.

"He's not sorry," he stage whispers.

"I think we're going to have sex now, the lad and I. Will that bother them?" Tim asks in complete earnestness, and he nearly pitches off his back, he's laughing so hard.

"You're really fucking drunk, darling."

The manager blinks.

"Oh, shit. We're going to be caught out for homosexuality now, aren't we? You know, I didn't mean that. I just, I am very drunk. He's right. I don't even like men. Breasts." He points at the man; his hat slips down into his eyes. "Breasts, yeah, that's what I like," he continues, tipping his head up so he can see the man rather than sliding the brim back out of his eyes.

"No, no, Tim, it's all right. We're from America," he tells the manager, remembering to sound as inbred as possible. "It's legal there now. Like he and I could get, like, married. Even if we were brothers."

"We're not brothers. Do you mind it if we're not brothers? And what the fuck are you talking about? You can't get married if you're brothers."

"Yes you can. How else do you explain that Honey Boo Boo show? Inbreeding, darling. It's what's for dinner. Or something like that."

Tim's accent has thickened so he can tell the manager is having trouble following him. "Look, I'm sorry about this. This Bombay shitehawk- you know, I'm wrote off the map, let me tell you. The craic, though, that was fuckin' ninety. But me friend- me _friend_ , let me emphasis -emphasize- I'm not, you know, we're not, humping the beast's backs. Sure you don't need to be after ringing the coppers or anything like that."

"It's 'making the beast with two backs', darling."

"Right." Tim pats his head. "That's what I said. Anyway," he says, so loudly the manager flinches back a bit, "we're going. I'm sorry. Tell anybody I woke up, I'm sorry. And tell them we're not brothers. I'm Catholic, like, you see, and I have enough things I have to confess."

"You haven't confessed in years, darling."

"That's true," Tim concedes, and with a shake of his head the manager slinks off to leave them careening up the rest of the stairs. He is beginning to sober; Tim is still in that particularly suggestible state of drunkenness, and is, with impressively little prompting, goaded into a rather nice rendition of 'Fuck You, I'm Drunk.' He is sure the other guests will applaud this skilled if not ideally timed performance.

"That's very nice, Tim," he says as the door is fumbled open and he slides at last off Tim's back. "Are you trained?"

"Oh, yeah. I was in a choir, didn't you know?"

"No; I'm not sure I've ever heard you sing before, actually." He pushes Tim back onto the bed, and leans over to take off his boots. One of the uncoordinated hands makes a grab for his collar; he deftly dodges it.

"Aren't we going to make beasts?"

"Not right now, darling. I'm sobering up. We'll wait twenty minutes or so, till you've metabolized your evening. I wouldn't want to take advantage of you. Or have you vomit on me."

"I want you to take advantage of me," Tim insists, but flops the hands back on the bed beside him, and consents to have his boots untied and slipped off, taking down his suspenders and untucking his shirt. The vest is unsnapped one-handed. "Fuck," he blurts out. "I forgot it's not a snap. I've just fucked all me buttons." He flings an arm up over his eyes, and sighs. "Jaysus, I am drunk."

He laughs and crawls up the bed to sit beside Tim's head, leaning back on one elbow and with his other hand brushing some of the hair from Tim's forehead. "If it's any consolation, you're a very entertaining drunk."

"Thanks a million." Tim grabs the hand from his forehead; there is a wet kiss placed on his wrist.

"Why don't you nap it off? I'll sit with you."

"Ah, I can't; I'm wired."

"Do you want me to read to you?"

"Would you?" Tim asks, and the head shushes across the sheets to re-position itself in his lap. "Your voice always puts me to sleep."

"To quote this one very eloquent man I know: fuck you." He leans over the side of the bed, careful not to disrupt Tim, and from the rucksack Tim has left, as Caroline would lament, like a 'freaking pig' randomly on the floor, he unearths the first book his hand alights upon. There are two generically pretty men on the cover, the one with his smooth chest bared to the heavens, and his shorn hair gentled by an obliging wind, so that he is dashing rather than disheveled.

He clears his throat with a theatrical ah-hem. "'Do you want me to mount you now?' Evan asked," he reads, and Tim bursts out laughing.

"It's like he's a fucking horse. Do you want me to mount you now, Kol Mikaelson? Give me a neigh, would you, there's a good lad," Tim says in an absurdly low voice.

"You have to do the sound effects, Tim."

He whickers obediently, snorting rather ungracefully in his mirth.

"That was terrible. Anyway: Adam opened his mouth to say no, but he didn't say that, couldn't say that. What he said was, 'Yes. Now. Yes. Hell, yes.' Swiveling his hips, Evan slid his linen covered cock around the outer borders of Adam's bulge, but not quite touching." He cocks his head at the book. "So he's not touching him, he's just…drawing an invisible box round Adam's cock with his own cock? I don't believe I've ever tried that one."

"Oh, I've heard the lads just go crazy over it. There's nothing sexier than invisible cock boxes." Tim tilts his head back and laughs up at him.

He flips forward a few pages. "Here we go: Then Evan tilted his head while his eyes blazed a near brilliant blue, caressing Adam's cock as he thrust out his tongue and licked the air, once, twice, three times." He flicks his tongue in imitation. Tim groans exaggeratedly. He sneaks a hand under the shoulder where he knows Tim is most ticklish, and gets a yelp and a "Fuck off!" out of him.

They slap at one another for a moment, and then he leans back against the headboard, and pages his way through one atrocity after another in pursuit of the best of them all.

"I love you," Tim says into the silence, and he freezes.

The blue eyes stare soberly up at him from beneath the brim of the cap. He thinks, somehow, in this Egyptian summer, his hands have died that impersonal demise of frostbitten January; the pages close sans sensation on his fingers.

He reaches down and slowly takes off Tim's hat.

There's a small scar next to his left eyebrow; you hardly ever see it, beneath this permanent fixture of battered tweed. He touches it with the tips of his fingers, and lets the rest of his hand settle back against the warm forehead.

"I know you're not comfortable with that. I just thought I'd say it this once, with your brother back."

This silly, drunken twit.

But, ah, yes, the Return of Nik, upon which the whole world turns, and the grasses themselves feverishly breathe not, and the desert winds cease to sigh. Nik who divides Time, Nik who divides affections, Nik who is the hallowed keeper of Before and Beyond, who walks his light snowfall steps to the nape of the neck and there whispers his sacred arrival.

Nik who was, for both boys who took their first tottering steps from his arms, All and Sundry.

He forgets, sometimes, Tim must once have loved him too.

With the flawed worship of a child, surely, who knows anything, twenty-one and freshly dead, but you reach out for what you can.

And do you still think it's nice, love, it isn't something which is dangled and torn away, you don't win it after all the long wars of human fickleness have passed and passed again, and lose it to a random twist of temper?

This is what he always feared, darling.

Nik isn't really his brother anymore.

When he died-

When he died, it was supposed to be different.

They were supposed to grieve at his feet and hug him round the legs and not conduct themselves perfectly, of course not, but he was going to be…noticed. Top billing.

He leans back against the headboard and touches one of the pale cheeks.

"You don't have to say it back," Tim tells him. "It doesn't bother me, if you can't, or you don't want to. I only thought you should know. For certain sure. I don't know if that's enough, me not being your brother and all."

He swallows.

"I know you're never sure where you stand with them, except that you're last. So I thought you should know exactly where you stand with me. And for anything I've done, and for everything they've done that made you feel like all the places inside of yourself you can't describe, I'm sorry."

Oh, the untidy poetry of the inebriated, who slosh their words not nearly so sloppily as they ought.

He cocks his head down at the unbearded cheeks, and the earnest eyes, and he touches the scar beside Tim's eyebrow again and inside him roars up everything that is unnameable. In all of humanity's tangled Babel Nabokov flirted with it, and Longfellow nearly captured it; and still longer did Hugo court it, and Dante pluck its prehistoric roots from purgatorial fogs to be thoroughly flensed.

But grief belongs to the dumb shrieks of the bestial genus. You can capture it at its sharpest point, when you are insensate with it, and only dissect it at its dullest, when suffering has lost its poetry, and you must settle for a clumsy poking of the reader. But to explain, oh, here was a _brother_ , he loved me like a silly folk tale, when men laid themselves down for an egg- you can't distill that into something plebeian as words.

If a language could clarify it, you wouldn't keep scratching away at it.

"He's not Nik anymore."

That's it.

That's as close as he can get.

This man is something called 'Klaus', of whom you may have heard the whispers, and never once to yourself thought: there is a man who sung his brother to dreamless sleep.

"I don't- what if I'm too tired of that now, Tim?"

"Listen," Tim says gently. "Listen to me. It's not selfish to take yourself away from something that's hurting you. That's not what love's supposed to look like. It doesn't matter how old or crazy you are."

* * *

She is dancing with Enzo when she spins back toward the bar, a little drunkenly, and freezes utterly.

Klaus is sitting on one of the stools, hands laced on his knees, face serenely murderous. He does not look at Enzo's hands on her waist, but you can feel all his attention homicidally concentrated on that one small point of contact, the thick callused fingers with their fine black hairs that squeeze her in just a little closer, the pale dizzying waver of the knuckles which dip in and out of human notice as the lights jolt against and then pass over them.

"Please. Continue," Klaus says.

"Ok. I will," she snaps, and whirls away from him, once more into Enzo, who stumbles back just a little, she bumps him that hard.

"Ah. The ex?" he asks, lifting an eyebrow.

"Excuse me?" Klaus demands tightly.

She can sense the dramatic descent, how the stool is a sort of pedestal from which he can pose for a minute, surveying his peons, until the bated moment when he at last allows this floor scrubbed by equally graceless and worthless hands to touch the designer boots, and support the Michelangelo molded knees.

"I didn't get your name, mate," Klaus says, edging into her peripheral vision with his hands behind his back, and the eerie smile that lifts the hairs at the nape of her neck.

"Enzo."

"I didn't ask."

"I have something new for you to try: not being a jerk. All the cool kids are doing it."

The brow softens when he looks from Enzo to her; she notices that immediately. He is head over black heart: you can see it the very instant he turns to her, and it's like everything in him suddenly ceases to revolve around his ego, and has instead a new sun to kneel before.

She's never quite ready for what it does to her stomach.

"Do you mind?" she asks crisply. "I was having fun."

"I apologize," Klaus replies, in that mild voice which is only a split second warning: he flashes to one of the stools, and back to Enzo before all her instincts have stopped belling their clamorous Oh Shit.

The legs penetrate his stomach; the seat is snapped off and resets his jaw.

Enzo sinks to his knees with a gurgle, spitting teeth.

"What the _hell_ is your problem? He's my _friend_. You can't just _stab_ him Klaus, oh my _God_."

"It's all right," Enzo wheezes as she helps him pull out the stool legs, and as gently as she can snaps the jaw with an ugly crunch back into place. "I've had worse. Gorgeous," he says with a little smirk on the last word, holding Klaus' eyes, which have at this moment probably cartoon sprung from his head, and quiver now in baffled astonishment at this man's steel-testicled audacity.

She pulls Enzo up by the elbow, slipping herself between the two men. "Get _out_."

"Caroline-"

"Get out, or behave yourself. Those are your options, _jackass_."

He licks his lips nervously. "I understand you're still upset, sweetheart-"

"Don't call me 'sweetheart'. Don't call me 'love'. You can just shove all those little fancy British endearments up your _ass_. I cannot _believe_ you. First you sic some werewolves on your own brother's boyfriend, who almost _died_ , by the way, not that you care, I'm sure; then you trick me out of New Orleans instead of just letting me in on your plans like a freaking _normal_ person; then you try to start a war with literally _everyone_ ; and _then_ , months later, you just waltz in here and when I don't lick your butt, you _stab_ Enzo."

Enzo slumps a little into her, and around her waist goes his arm, and the head lolls a bit on her shoulder, the soft hair grazing her neck. He lets his knees buckle a bit, probably just for dramatic effect, because good freaking _God_ every single one of these assholes is such a freaking drama queen, but she supports him anyway, just in case, and most definitely not because Klaus' jaw has acquired that particularly murdery tightness he does not dare act upon.

"I made sure Tim got the cure," he protests.

" _That's_ all you have to say? 'Ok, sure, I made him endure hours of agonizing pain and also totally betrayed your trust and everything, but OMG, Caroline, what are you complaining about, it's not like Tim _died_ died.' I want to kick you in the _face_."

"Not the most vulnerable or renowned part, gorgeous," Enzo stage whispers helpfully into her ear.

"This is a _private_ conversation!" Klaus snaps, taking a step forward so he can against Enzo silently dick measure, and assume with smirky assurance he has once more come away superior. He cocks his head dangerously; the necklaces shift against his collarbones, and she is so totally not contemplating the taste of his neck, and how the tendons twitch beneath her tongue.

Look. _Look_ : she hasn't been laid in a while.

"It's not a private conversation. We're not having a conversation. I'm leaving. Come on, Enzo."

"Ah, well, mate. That's how it goes sometimes. I'll be sure to see her safely back to the hotel," Enzo assures Klaus, and winks.

They are, predictably, blocked at the door by Klaus and his big fat head that she did not miss at all.

" _Excuse_ us."

"We aren't finished, Caroline," he tells her, in his best low and menacing I Am God Hear Me Roar, and she is so abruptly furious she shrugs Enzo's arm off her shoulders, and shoves him behind her, and she can puff her chest and fluff her hair and to her voice conjure the same ominous promise, _buddy_ , so you can just zip up your pants and step away from the freaking ruler.

"Yes. We. Are. Because I said so," she tells him half an inch from his nose, not thinking, of course not thinking, of how his chest grazes her own, and the fine blonde down on his cheek catches the lights, and there is in his eyes the predatory gleam to which she was drawn and the strange lurking tendernesses for which she stayed.

She thinks for a moment he might eat her.

And then the eyes light up and the dimples are genuinely flashed, not for the unholy contrast of boyish man, godless monster, but because he's just so _happy_ to stand in this same stale summer air where she exists, and he reaches out for her cheeks and his bashed up poet-warrior's hands touch her so, so softly, and he says, "You're beautiful when you're angry, love," and she grabs him by the wrists.

For a moment, she does think about it: how much distance a quick yank of her hands would end.

"I am not _flirting_ with you. _Freak_ ," she snaps, and shoves him away.

"Tah," Enzo says, flourishing an imaginary hat as they sweep out the door.

She grabs him by the collar as soon as the door has shut behind them. "Run. He's going to be really pissed."

"So I should abandon you to him when you've just infuriated him, gorgeous? That's not very gentlemanly."

"He won't hurt me. Go find Kol or something. I'll handle him."

"He's probably busy snogging Tim."

"So? Join them or something. They're weirdos. They'll probably like that. Just leave now. Or I castrate you."

"All, right; I'll trust your judgment, gorgeous," he says, and kisses her on the cheek. He flashes across the street, and waves cheerfully. "But if he murders you, I'm going to take really terrible revenge in your name."

And he does blow through the doors like Zeus descending, thunderbolt in hand, sending the doorman flying, and when the poor man gets up to stop him, snatching the heart from him before his flustered immortal senses can probably even detect the hand in his chest.

He throws it onto the sidewalk. "I'm trying to _apologize_."

" _Good job_!" she screams.

"There's no need to make this so _difficult_."

"And there's no need for you to be such an _ass_!"

"Don't be unreasonable, Caroline, I was _protecting_ you-"

"No. _No_! This was about your ego. This was about you controlling everything. This was about reassuring yourself that you still could, because the Great and Powerful Klaus actually fell for somebody, and that just opens up a whole can of freaking worms, doesn't it? What next? You might actually respect people's autonomy and stop sticking them in coffins every time they do something you haven't pre-approved? What _would_ the world come to?"

His mouth tenses, and the furrow between his eyebrows deepens; she can feel his fury even here, with a good three feet of pavement between them.

"You are such a coward sometimes," she says more quietly. "You can't let your family be happy. You can't let yourself be happy. You are just a sad, sad little man, who can't get over Daddy."

She can tell how that's struck him.

He lived a thousand trenches, and charged a thousand guns.

And you couldn't kill him. You poured your whole generation of raw patriot-children into the gaps at Somme, and the sludge of Passchendaele, and you couldn't kill him.

If you could see him reeling here.

She turns on her heel, and walks off.

* * *

He spies for a while on his brother, who is tired, who has a thundercloud on his brow, and yet is laughing.

He looks like he hasn't slept in all thousand troubled years of his existence, poor Kol.

But he is lying beside Tim on the disheveled bed, and laughing over some book they are passing back and forth, so hard he has to cover his face, or weep into the side of the boy's neck, clinging with hysterical joy to the lanky body.

There is, judging by their tones, some sort of dramatic reading at play here, but he tunes his ears carefully so it is beyond him, and watches the reactions sans their context.

Kol, Kol, faithful devotee of his youth, when there was nothing worth a glance.

He leaves them both alive.

Bekah is napping, hair coiled beneath her cheek.

And Caroline, Caroline-

She jerks the window open and says, less maliciously then perhaps he deserves, "Don't stand outside like a creeper."

He keeps his hands carefully behind his back, and hunches a little into himself, so she can see, he isn't here to preen or challenge, he is not, as she probably assumes, quite so callous as the carefully-ordered curls, and the casually fastidious shirt might suggest.

She looks up at him through the curls and this Judas heart of his thumps, lifts, is altogether quite pathetic, he thinks oh, love, _love_ , and kneels at her feet.

He does not understand how else to apologize.

To lay his power and his prestige at her feet, to grip the knees in their dusty jeans and lean his cheek upon them, to say as well as he is able, here is…everything I am- before what other mercy can such a creature prostrate himself?

"Did you see your brother?" she asks, not touching him.

He takes a shaky breath. "I went to him first. He walked away from me."

"You deserved that."

But she touches the crown of his head, not to thrust him away, but merely to rest the fingers, to feel for the first time in six months which have stretched themselves with an eon's elasticity the familiar hair, the slope of the forehead which she has luxuriously explored through so many sleepless nights, when lovers repose in their own regenerative adoration.

He turns his face toward it, lets the fingers run along his stubbled jaw to the indent of the chin and the tender underside of the bottom lip, feels with careful mouth the inside of the wrist, and the fine nap of the peach hair along its outside, brushes with his nose the knuckles he has commemorated in insufficient charcoal.

"Have I lost him?" he asks, and it's Caroline, it's Caroline- of course he need not bother to puff himself up, and pretend to either of them that everything does not hinge upon this-

"I don't know. If you have…you have. And you're going to have to accept that."

"But I don't know how to be without him," he whispers, and turns his face back into her leg.

"And I don't know how to be without my mom. And you probably didn't either, when it first happened. He died, Klaus. You were going to have to figure it out anyway." She strokes her hand down his head and into the nape hair, where it comes to rest against his spine. "I'm not ready to forgive you yet. I will be. Just not now. So here's what you're going to do," she says. "You're going to leave him alone. He's going to come to you, if he wants to. You're not going to hurt Tim. You're not going to hurt Enzo. You're not going to take any of this out on Rebekah. You're going to give me time, and I'll come find you when I'm ready."

She lifts his face, so he can see how she means it. "I will be, Klaus, I promise."

* * *

She hears the sloppy pre-sex sounds of pretty imminent copulation beyond their door, but it doesn't sound particularly romantic, just good old-fashioned doing it, so she taps politely on the door, and then bursts inside.

"Hey, are you guys busy?"

Tim immediately jerks away from Kol's mouth, lifting himself on an elbow and blinking at her with this sort of startled deer bewilderment, but Kol, one hand buried in his hair, just keeps going, kissing at his neck and collarbones.

"Fuc- stop it," he says, hitting Kol with a pillow.

"If she wants to watch, let her watch, Tim. What are you embarrassed about? She wouldn't be the first."

"Hello? Are you guys busy?" she repeats, because they have kind of rudely erupted into this little married squabble and are completely ignoring her.

"Not at all," Tim replies in this voice that is almost verging on pissy.

She rolls her eyes. "I meant aside from doing it, duh. You guys do that all the time. Do it later." She flings herself knees-first onto the edge of the bed.

"Jesus _Christ_ ," Tim says, and rolls off Kol, covering himself with a pillow. "Would you turn your back for a moment?"

"Why? So you can put on the pants I've already seen you out of?" She gives him a little pop on the ass as she crawls up between them. "Nice underwear."

"Kol-"

"Oh my God, Tim, what is he, your mother? Get over yourself; I've seen guys in their boxers before. You're not creepy-looking or anything. Good leg to hair ratio. Just calm your…testicles."

Tim turns bright red.

Kol scrunches his nose. "Is that the right term?"

"Well, technically it's 'calm your tits', but he doesn't have boobs, so. Anyway!" She claps her hands together, once. "What were you guys doing pre-erections?"

"Could you please- I just-"

"Oh no! I know about that thing where when you're sexually aroused your penis stands up! Like, it's not a big deal. You have no idea _how_ many guys in school I saw pulling the old backpack-in-the-lap move-"

"Would you stop laughing, you flaming eejit?" Tim hollers at Kol, who isn't even bothering with the courtesy of trying to sputter into his palm. "Caroline, you have to knock. You can't just come barging in here-"

"I _did_. I'm not a barbarian." She is actually just a teensy bit offended- she was, after all, a teenager in that murky independence of pre-apartment cohabitation, when a mother might happen at any moment upon your struggling adulthood, still in its first tender years of discovery.

"You knock, we tell you you may enter, and _then_ you come in."

"Okaaaaay. But you were busy."

"I'm quite proud of this, actually. Under my excellent tutelage, clearly her understanding of and respect for boundaries is slowly being utterly obliterated." Kol smiles at Tim over her head. "Don't make 'I hate you' eyes at me, darling," he says, something secret in the curve of his mouth.

And it's kind of cute, he does soften, he looks at them both with this sort of fond exasperation, rolls himself carefully out of bed, pillow still in place, and squirms with as much virgin awkwardness as she has ever seen a man that old wrestle himself into his pants, the pillow carefully shielding everything.

She snatches it away from him, and tosses it to Kol. Tim is still in the process of buttoning his fly, and in his surprise, slips out an accented _shit_ that sounds something like 'shite'.

"I see London, I see France!" she singsongs.

"Is that the one about his underpants? I like that one."

Tim blurs and comes up with something in his hand she doesn't see; he hurls it at Kol, who dodges it easily.

Being boys gets the better of them or something, because Kol gets tackled off the bed and they start wrestling on the floor, only half-seriously, so she picks up the book from the nightstand on what she assumes is Tim's side of the bed and flips to the bookmark.

"This man has a hot dog in his butt!" she shrieks, covering her mouth.

"That's Tim's smut," Kol says from the floor, where Tim has pinned his arms with both knees.

"Oh my God! Is this, like, the gay guy's version of Fifty Shades of Grey?"

"What- no! I'm not reading it seriously! I mean, I'm not- I'm not having one off to it or anything."

"You should see the one we were reading earlier tonight. One of the men gets a 'banana job'. It's exactly what it sounds like."

"Can I borrow this?"

"No."

"He's stingy with his books."

"That's because when I do loan them out, they come back with the front cover missing and the first half of the book totally ruined by blood."

Kol, still pinned, shrugs. "You murder one man with _The Brothers Karamazov_ and suddenly you've got a reputation."

"It was _War and Peace_ , you gom. _Brothers Karamazov_ you were playing Olympics with."

"Discus throw," Kol clarifies for her. "Anyway, he's terribly pissy about his books. You might want to be careful even touching that one. You might smudge the cover and then he'll really lose it."

"You're a terrible pain in me arse, Mikaelson."

"Only when you want it rough, darling."

"TMI," she says, trying to determine whether or not she can smuggle the book out in her bra.

Kol flips Tim off him and scrambles back up onto the bed, which dips pretty violently beneath his sudden weight, and totally invites himself half onto her lap, one of his legs slinging casually over hers, his head settling on her shoulder. He is, thankfully, in only the most preliminary stages of nakedness, missing his shirt and nothing else. "What are you doing here anyway?"

She smooths her hand over one of the pages, and does not think about how Klaus looked when she lifted his chin and she told him, as gently as her anger allowed, that he might have to leave for a very long time. "I just…didn't want to sit all alone in my room. Not right now."

"Ah," Kol replies, and with him it's all you have to say.

* * *

There is someone in his room.

For a moment his heart is born aloft on that bright and feeble hope, Caroline- but it is a man.

And this allows within him the germination that it is Kol, that frail seed hope which supersedes all base and common senses.

But a monster denounces his follies far faster than a man; he shakes off the cobwebs; he sees the world through his roseate fiction for only a moment, and restores it to its common shades of gray.

The cologne is not his brother's, and the breathing neither; and Kol, in the boredom which for him strikes anytime he is made to wait for his confrontations or his mischief, will cross the ankles and jog them impatiently. The man in his room is more patient; you hear merely the carotid thumping of the heart, and the sighing of the faint breaths which touch the nostrils briefly.

He opens the door casually, as though he has not noticed.

He does hope this man is here to kill him.

What daylight's sunny vales gentle darkness menaces, and so he leaves off the lights and lets the shadows converge as they will on any beast of fantasy, who jars not nearly so many children from their safe and slumberous mists.

It's the Enzo creature.

Lounging unconcerned on his bed with his hands behind his head, and the sandy boots on the sheets.

He rifles through his monologues. Yes, the one he gave that uppity Maharaja back in, oh, perhaps the 1600s- that was quite the eloquent send-off, and you'll excuse his plagiarism; there is no better a wit for him to reproduce.

He wets his lips. "We are beholden so to nature, that-"

"I thought I recognized your face, mate," the creature interrupts.

"Excuse me?" He drops his voice. The eyes acquire their deadly yellow tinge. He was _speaking_ , _mate_.

"You were stabbing me at the time, so I couldn't be sure. But it is you."

"Do we know each other? I apologize; I don't have much recollection for the rabble."

The man smiles, smugly, as is the only way he appears capable of accomplishing anything. He does hate smugness; it's unbecoming in one who has absolutely nothing upon which to congratulate himself. "The 11th Sherwood Foresters."

Something kindles in his breast, a distant recognition.

"You were that twat officer."

He tilts his head; his stomach churns, and the heart gives a sudden lurch, back through all his eons of memories he sorts, throwing aside the faces which have become irreparably blurred, and the decades which are almost entirely blank-

No.

"I'm quite hurt you don't remember an old army buddy, mate."

He feels that blind rage seize him by the throat which no feeble half-wit such as this ought to exercise over any man whose greatness will forever eclipse his generations upon generations of lessers, and clasps his hands behind his back.

"Private St. John? I used to outshoot you in training exercises all the time. We'd have a great laugh about it."

"I'm sorry, was that your name? I'm afraid your aggressive mediocrity must have buried it under things of actual import," he snaps. "And it's not very gentlemanly to lie, mate."

The smile broadens. It makes his hairline look like it's receding.

Also he got fat.

The sandy boots stir on his bed, and streak the crisp new sheets, and the head lolls back, so casually, against the headboard, the eyes are simply _blasphemous_ , scrutinizing him as they do, as though this _pissworm_ has any right to pass judgment upon his untouchable deities.

"Listen, old chum, you tell yourself whatever you need to. We all have our fantasies."

"Would you like to beg for mercy or anything like that now?" he snaps. "I'm not going to make it quick either way, but you're welcome to try and appeal to something deeply buried within me."

Enzo does not so much as blink. "But what would Caroline say?"

"I'm confident your death will make just as much an impact as it did the first time round. Pity; the Germans should have been a bit more thorough with you."

Enzo stretches his legs, sweeping the boots once more over the sheets, and being sure to give them a good scrubbing with the soles. He'll need to burn the whole lot now, of course. "I think Caroline will be rather put out with you, mate. She did order you to stop stabbing me, after all. I just wouldn't want you to get in any trouble."

"Caroline is not my keeper!" He remembers at just the last moment to soften the edges of this, so this bloody idiot doesn't give himself notions that he's affected him somehow, no more than a man might notice how his boots crush not merely field grass but all that wriggling myriad of soiled life which burrows in the plough grooves.

"My mistake, mate. I thought I spotted her leash round your dick. You know, Klaus, I've heard about you, of course; we all have. Something something Katerina Petrova something something ultimate doom. You know how dramatic vampires can be. Anyway, I thought you were going to be taller. Maybe a little more muscular. If I'd known you were that whiny little bitch from the trenches I'd have let everyone know to not worry."

He blurs across the room.

He slams Enzo's head through the plaster wall, cracks the skull, splits the forehead skin, and the man is _laughing_ , there are genuine tears in his eyes, he is that jovial with his current situation-

"Like this, _this_ is the bloody Scourge of the Monsters-"

He grabs the feeble neck in one hand and hurls Enzo across the room, into the door which breaks his shoulder and cracks one of the ribs and he just bloody stands back up, stretching his neck to either side while he waits for everything to slowly link by link knit itself whole.

"You're not going to kill me," Enzo tells him. "And trust me, mate- you can't hurt me."

"That sounds like a challenge, sweetheart," he says, and grasps the neck once more, with the frail tendons twitching beneath his fingers and the body at least secure in the knowledge of what this man's thick head cannot wrap itself round-

But Enzo smiles once more, and brings both hands up to cup the cheeks he sacrificed to his razor after a couple of days in this bloody heat, and he leans in so their noses are nearly touching, ignoring the hand round his neck. "You better treat her like the treasure you most definitely didn't earn and don't deserve, or I'll find a way to make you pay. You've clearly already hurt her once, so I'll be back. Sir."

And then one naked cheek is condescendingly patted and the numb fingers which he has practically forgotten round the deserving throat are peeled away, and he is left, dumbstruck, in the middle of his room.

* * *

 **1916, Petrograd**

She does love a good backstage: the nervous perfume of the humans' brows, and the dozen shrewd spotlights which the anxious eyes apply to her, the next scene's solo and gifted luminary.

And of course, the boots poor Hilarion has removed to air between acts his labored feet. What lashed beasts of burden they must be, following such a vigorous first act; what cool waters she has for you to chill the weeping things.

She uncorks her vial, and washes the insides of the boots down with a good dousing of her concoction. Nik showed it to her, rather proudly; some invention of one past and sordid acquaintance or another. Etc. etc. She had a reflection to admire rather than a lecture to attend. And anyway, Elijah, who doesn't want the show spoiled prematurely, helped her calculate the dose she will need to penetrate his tights, to convulse the bewildered limbs at just the precise height of dramatic climax, to ensure he is a credit rather than a burden to the scene.

He doesn't entirely approve, of course.

The arts should never be so endangered by petty revenges.

She corks the vial once more.

Silly brother.

There is no such beast as an unnecessary revenge.

The heavy curtain parts.

She perches for a moment in the wings, letting the first gentle strains of the orchestra touch and lift the audience, who see, some through moistened pocket squares, the lone grave against its painted backdrop. You will find its trees of brooding menace in your heavier fables, which dress in their unchallenged shadows the witch and her mortar bones. See, perhaps, her flitting between branches, where the sun is, far-off, a reminder: somewhere is a day untouched by poets, who know not how to render such light as this with the most talented of pens.

But oh, sweet audience, not here.

You who shall see the lovely face and the hair left romantically about her shoulders, and walk with bated hearts in her delicate footsteps-

She does pity you.

The gilded boxes, the bright satins foaming over demure legs, the fashionably low necklines, these snowfalls of perfumed breasts which hover nervously- on the privileged smiles only the sun, and never his December foil.

Isn't that so, pets?

She smiles.

Oh, to have her brother out of his silly mud and guts.

He always does know how to shake a sleeping aristocracy.

She glides onto the stage, floating from out of the trunks which have been dressed and poised on the sides of the stage.

The veil lifts at its hem. Her dress of fine white tulle drifts afterward.

Here the music is barely present: a soft accompaniment, so the eyes, the ears, the entirety of the dumb human senses are hardly aware of anything beyond this figure in white, this ethereal being with her tiny slippered feet and her long graceful arms, pale as the dress.

Gently, she tiptoes offstage, and pauses so the veil can be discarded, and the audience left to wonder: was this creature merely a figment of this wood from which any manner of fabled beast might spring?

And back she drifts, the arms in soft swan fannings out to either side.

You want them to wonder about this apparition. The powdered face, the graceful leg which lifts the dress, the arch of the supple spine: soft Death, the music suggests, with such aching beauty as only strings can convey to the listening hearts. No living maiden touches one like this, and pounds compassion back into such an audience, fat with gold.

The stage is cool beneath her toes, and the little cross which she carefully tiptoes her way toward aglow with strategic lights.

Up and up she ripples the arms, the dress floating silently round her, spuming out from the pirouettes, and then the sprigs of oak are gathered into her hands, and first to the wood she twirls her way, with a soft pat pat pat of the slippers, and back to the cross, where she holds her poses statuesquely.

Round and round the stage, the audience silent, the music swelling, the sprigs beckoning their little come hither flicks-

She dips gracefully toward the stage; the sprigs are flourished toward the towering wood, and then, to one side of the stage, jauntily tossed.

She covers her lost distance in a leap; the ankles touch gracefully mid-air, with no elephantine clacking of the bones; you might say she floats into the jump: here gravity holds no court.

Up and up and up spirals the music; there is a joy now in the wooded instruments which playfully inform her next turn or leap. Death is for no one so pretty a convict chain; the audience relaxes its hold upon that tense expectation of doom which Death is supposed to herald.

There is a spike and another and another in the accompaniment, and one pirouette, two, three, the skirt frothing round her, the toes carrying her through each perfect spin, that dizzying anticipation of the end hold, which must be timed precisely, out she snaps the arms, and raises the chin, unsmiling, so the crowd can look upon her and know: something looms in her eyes.

She gives them a moment to applaud, to reassure themselves as she steps out once more, delicately, why, she's only a wood sprite, prettier, thinner, superior to any mortal imagination can carve from wildest dreams, of course, but see how the little feet carefully pick their way, and the arms sway, the skirts gesturing afterward-

And then the veiled corps from silent backstage creep.

Three to a line, and another three after them, silently they come, gliding from either side of the stage, and at ankle height the sudden surge of cold mists, which the audience must feel now down its startled spine-

* * *

 **1916, France**

It is a morning which no poet could have dreamed from his effusive pen.

The sky has, perhaps, known a more perfect blue, but not in his memory. At this hour of dawn, there is yet a distant cloud of mist, which the sun, fat as any painter could hope from his brush, struggles through.

The British barrage screams over his head, and Jerry responds with his lusty Whizz Bangs; the ground is, appropriately, tremulous before such technological rage. The children which unscrupulous recruiters have allowed into this morass of what any experienced eye ought to perceive as almost certain death flinch into their older comrades.

But there is, for the most part, a silence either nervous or simply anticipatory in this dugout. Some neighboring commanders have allowed their men early into No Man's Land, where they lie now a few yards closer to the German trenches; his own men cluster round the ladders, waiting.

Zero hour crouches over them all.

In all war there are a few who cannot tolerate these uncertain final moments, when there is the wind of Death on the neck, and the gleaming of glory somewhere beyond those barbed miles of Hun wire. There are two reports in his own platoon: one lad has shot himself in the knee, and the other, whose rum has perhaps spoiled his aim, in the groin; both have got their Blighty wounds, anyhow, and are carried off in pale-faced triumph.

He checks his watch; the first mine is to be blown at 7.20, which tiptoes at its leisure toward the waiting men.

That insufferable private is in the corner chatting at some nervous bloke: it'll be all right, Billy, nothing to concern yourself about, hasn't command said it's to be a walk over, etc. etc.- the usual platitudes, he supposes. He can't be bothered to listen.

"How are the nerves doing, old boy?" the private asks him next, and claps him on the back, with purposeful force, so that if he were a mere man, he might be knocked into the trench wall. There is an affected lilt to the voice, which he knows the _ant_ intends to mock him. The human's God forbid he be unashamed of his education and his experience, of which this workhouse trash hasn't an inkling. Perhaps he walked past Oxford once, or pressed his dirty nose to the hallowed windows, and to himself pondered the strange mechanics of those papery boxes with the alien scribbles inside.

He does hope this offensive kills him slowly.

He tightens his jaw and does not grace the man with so much as a look.

A few lucky shots which an easily impressed human might attribute to some actual genius of marksmanship and this _twit_ gives himself airs.

His watch has reached the minute marker; he informs the dugout.

The boy beside him, with hair the color of Kol's, and that same familiar dimpling of the chin, wants to watch the explosion from the firing step.

"You'll want a good grip on something," he warns, and the boy looks toward this smug private with his ragged scrap of trench beard, dirty as he is assuredly used to being, and lights up when the private nods him toward the step.

"The Jerries ought to be busy with our bombardment. Just be careful, all right, mate?"

"Thirty seconds," he says.

The boy mounts the firing step.

There is a tremendous rumble.

The earth forms a sort of hurricane some 500 yards off, one vast column of chalk and dirt which climbs as a mighty wave might before a feeble prow; there is one breathless moment of silence in the trench, and then the shock wave strikes it, and jerks the entire thing from side to side, knocking the boy off the step and the private, whom he deftly sidesteps to avoid any unconscious assistance, to the ground.

The Germans are for perhaps a few minutes still with their own awe; and then the heavy guns start up, unceasingly, as though suddenly a great slumber has been shaken off, and the enemy is freshly awake and raring.

"We've fucked it," the private murmurs, looking a bit pale round the lips.

To assume every Boche gun has suddenly roared to life is perhaps no grim embellishment; there is a Biblical hail overhead which sings and pops against the dirt, whistling through the wire and into the men who already are bellied out in No Man's Land awaiting the first wave of the morning offensive; he has to carefully tune his ears so the thunder does not send him screaming to his knees.

He helps the boy, pale-faced, into his pack, and adjusts the helmet on his head.

The mist, still low-lying in some places, is disrupted by both bombardments, and when the bullets hit flinches its bulk as a lake might shrug off a thousand stones. He has, in all his years of aloft saber, smoking musket, bloodied spear, never seen anything quite like it.

At 7.28, the other mines are blown, and the whole earth moves once more. There is no Homeric epic which may conjure such a scene: Troy's chariots suffered no such deific threat as this. Fearless Achilles, for whom there was no sense in cringing before a death hour already told, would surely have kneeled before it.

And indeed, the boy is terrified; he is seventeen; to what extent has Death even familiarized itself with such a youth; what does he know, what can he _imagine_ of how the hot screaming lead will sever him from everything he knows, and perhaps send him aimlessly drifting into what black yonder he doesn't understand and where he knows none, loves none, is perhaps to flounder forever in man's greatest fear, when all the earth has shut him out and says aught, though he goes screaming along all its open doors seeking its hearths-

Shh, shh, he says, and cradles the nape of the boy's neck in his hand. It'll be all right, Kol.

So are such little slips overlooked.

When the British bombardment at precisely 7.30 lifts and is re-positioned, there is an eerie silence. The German guns have unthinkingly paused as well, and to the chirping birds given a sudden spotlight.

There is a perfect sun overhead, and not a cloud. Down his neck goes that whiff of what will be an unseemly hot day. The boy's hair is completely wet beneath his helmet.

The smarmy private has the half-moons of unvoiced nerves beneath his arms.

There is, for a moment, the bewilderment of a thousand thousand expectations, which hoped, perhaps, for something momentous, for something which would clearly mark the end of that interminable wait, when men are driven to madness and drink by unperturbed clocks.

This is a disappointment, the sinking hearts realize, and the medals are to be unclaimed, and the fame unrealized: for what government will hang a man with bronze who sauntered unchallenged from his trench and leisurely loped to the littered death of a long-vanquished enemy?

And then the guns find their next target, and all round him he hears the whistles blowing, and blasts his own.

"Over the top, men!" he hollers, and clambers up the ladder.

* * *

The silent white figures converge on her.

She smiles.

They do make a lovely picture, all those beautiful white skirts, and the mist foaming round the tiptoes, which carry this silent hoard to the edge of the stage, where the audience is to admire their synchronization and to be charmed by the veiled faces which have long since seen and parted from sweet pink youth, but retain still that maidenly crispness-

* * *

They have first to surmount the British wire, but the men have regained their courage: there is a friend at either shoulder, an officer before him, the lines dressing themselves and then pushing forward, forward over the chalk and the dirt and those disrupted patches which have been shifted by the bombs-

And then one of the German buglers yanks the men from their dugouts and into the trenches and the machine guns open their throats and now these lines upon lines of men are suddenly funneled through Dante's infamous gates; a bullet slams his helmet; there is a ringing in his ears; to either side of him are the shrieks of wounded men, dying men, men in every throe of agony: and the guns chatter on.

Where the ground is marshy from earlier rains that softened the fields, slowed the guns, sank the ambulance bearers, men flounder, and are fatally delayed.

One of the Whizz Bangs catches a nearby platoon sergeant in the throat; his head vanishes in a puff of red.

The gunners target the gaps in the wire, where the British troops are trying to squeeze their way through, and to this task add the mountainous difficulty of the newly dead, who catch their feet, blunder their steps, block their openings, and wholly clog the gaps with even newer dead.

And on the lines come, their rifles across their chests, the bayonets shining, and in the sky the birds trying to out-sing the guns.

* * *

She stands in their midst like a director, and gestures the girls line by line, and occasionally dancer by dancer, into their next shapes. The creamy slippers catch the light, and the veils float gently round them, the legs lifting and kicking and all those lines upon lines of delicate white arms fluttering so they are merely one entity-

* * *

The endlessly talking, talking Jerry guns are relentless; they fell wave after wave, whole clumps of men falling together, and behind them the wounded many taking cover in their death or crawling into what rare shell hole can be found-

When the wave is once traversed, the guns track back over it, picking off the survivors.

He sees the private jerk, cry out, keep walking.

On and on into the firestorm the British are fed; one might think they are immortal as he, the way they walk calmly into their certain demises, an entire army of soldiers who can be felled once, twice, thrice, and still the guns must consent to murder them once more-

But, no, he smells death all round him, he sees the young boys crying, and their friends still against the chalk, his helmet is once more struck, to his right a man goes down shrieking, on his left another falls silently, and then suddenly the earth lives beneath his feet once more: there is a great rumbling, and then a geyser: a column of chalk soars and soars, and then slowly it tips, onto the line of men away to his left, who are swallowed by this massive wave. He sees them disappear beneath earth and rock and flame, some who will not go silently, and scream until they are smothered, some who are taken unawares, and slip noiselessly into this frothing maw- but this delayed mine has blown the German posts, or badly damaged them, and there is the sudden benediction of a nearly empty sky-

"Move!" he screams. "On the double, lads, on the double!" And there is a surge: the survivors are newly buoyant with this messy success, and sweep toward the first German trenches.

The batteries, which their own bombardment HQ assured had decisively destroyed, begin firing. The earth geysers and smokes and all around him men cry out or merely disappear; the boy forgets to address him properly and screams out "Nick!" and then one of the shells bursts and he is splattered everywhere.

The smoke stings his eyes and the shells hurt his ears and through this strange Armageddon he proceeds, screams all around him, the ground rumbling and the birds still singing and that oddly inconsistent sky cheerfully blue, a picnic sky, he thinks idly, and in front of him another man is cut down by machine gun fire but does not die; he wants, in this precise order, water and his mother.

Behind him, the waves continue to advance, the men walking as though they are strolling in the woods. He has seldom witnessed such courage in this rather twitchy race; even the wounded stagger on so as not to let down their friends, and are cut down or faint into the ragged dead-

* * *

Giselle enters during her next solo and begins prancing about, as though anyone cares about that twit whose legs are not nearly so long, and whose form does not remotely approach her mastery. Around and around she flails, and then out again sail all the girls in white, sans their veils this time, who part obligingly for her and in the center of the stage form a wide area for her to display her myriad talents.

She leaps and lets the skirt fly prettily round her, highlighting the strong calves, and the delicate feet, the music with its little trills and high peaks and then the lively announcements of the orchestra which introduces the plucky cavorting of the girls, who are quite lovely, when they're not hogging her spotlight. Not a foot moves out of time, or an arm wave out of sync, there is before this gloomy forest the whole ethereal bunch of them, flying and hopping and with simply otherworldly grace gesturing the arms and to each burst of the instruments soaring a little higher-

* * *

The German wire has not been cut.

He can see the private could with his bare hands kill every officer who promised easy entry, who assured them the bombardment would snip the tangles, and leave the Jerry trenches vulnerably open, but he keeps his head and forces himself through where he can; but equipment is a hamper rather than a savior in such cases, and he is hung up on the wire.

"Good luck, mate," he says, and smiles.

He lets himself through a gap he has found, taking several German bullets and continuing on cheerfully.

* * *

Giselle and Albrecht have their touching little pas de deux.

She supposes.

If you can call that dancing; the girl lands her jumps like a hippo.

But never mind her undeserved moment of notoriety.

Albrecht and Giselle exit.

The girls line up one after another, each with one arm out in front of her, and into their midst dashes Hilarion, who appears quite sweaty about the upper lip, and pale beneath his makeup.

Just lovely.

Back and forth he runs and leaps as the girls flood the stage, like a little panicked animal.

The music swells.

* * *

He is struck in the shoulder, the knee, the abdomen, and for a moment he hunches beneath this onslaught; his rifle is knocked askew in his hands; the helmet is now worthless, and cast aside. The bullets sizzle into the dirt and the grass ripples round him and chalk blows itself sky-high and somewhere down the line another shell bursts and carries several screaming into the next life. He can see one of the Scottish units snared by their kilts in the wire, flailing or hanging silently or with Christ-like serenity peering skyward.

That unbearable private has untangled himself somehow from the wire, and rushes miraculously alive into the brunt of the fire.

He has gone mad, or settled on his death as a certainty, and has decided to meet it headfirst, rather than cringing in some hole or another awaiting imprisonment or the decisive bullet.

The shells miss him and the machine guns somehow sweep harmlessly past, and he runs on, cradling his rifle, the helmet dented but not defenseless, several stragglers joining him as they see those first trenches within reach and, so close they might touch it, their objective looms suddenly before them, with an enemy they can finally strike, with soft flesh they might at last reap their revenge upon-

That little _worm_ is not about to beat him to the German front line.

He rolls his shoulder which has a moment before taken another hit, and takes off at a dead sprint.

* * *

Round and round the poor man twirls and pirouettes and leaps as the white sea foams about him, his landings only slightly shaky, his tumble still purposeful and not a failing, the girls soaring after him, leaping in tandem, all that endless white upon white circling round him as he huddles on the stage, no longer miming his pain, but struggling to maintain his professionalism-

* * *

Private Who Bloody Cares Anyway reaches the first trench, and with his little ragtag bunch of survivors converges on the Germans, who like the wire have not been vanquished, but wait in great numbers to repel this rush of howling madmen-

* * *

In the center of them he spins and staggers and clutches at his stomach, that circle narrowing and narrowing and narrowing-

* * *

The trench is an asylum of frothing men who gnash rabid teeth and sink to their knees, bayoneted, or from the crush rise to bash a jaw or knife a stomach: to join it is to throw oneself directly into the hurricane's eye, which this fool private has done with the sort of abandon which is the sole domain of the brave or the stupid.

He will lay his pounds on the latter, of course.

But the man pushes forward and pushes forward and slowly the khaki has begun to overtake the grey, there is the singing of bayonet on bayonet and the whistle of the shells overhead and beyond them the fresh geysers of newly-tilled earth-

* * *

The girls line up patiently, wave upon wave of them, arms extended to await her command as she circles and leaps about Hilarion, who twirls not nearly so gracefully now, whose colorless cheek reveals his torment, and the pinched lips confirm-

* * *

He fights off one of the Germans with his rifle, and shoots another with his pistol.

He is flecked with blood of all nationalities; the day has indeed delivered its hellish promise, and steams the sweat off his neck. In the trench is the stink of death, the stench of the underarms and the unwashed hair and those beards with all manner of trench creatures in them and into one of the soft stomachs he jabs the bayonet, and out again into the next, blood spraying, entrails spilling, the ground gone treacherous beneath his boots, oily with death, but the Germans are retreating, some of them tossing down their guns to assume that age-old position of surrender and others crawling from the trenches to run, screaming, into their own barrage-

* * *

Hilarion spins and spins and spins, wobbling now, and the girls form up again, into one long line which stretches toward the audience, toward the painted wood, she leads them forward in this graceful march of the endless white wave as he stumbles back, back, the line advancing on him-

With a gesture of her arm he spins, falls, cowers back, sweating, and the corps in unison lifts each of the hands facing him and pops onto its tiptoes to flutter in place, the little feet going, going-

* * *

He thinks the private will make it over the lip of this trench and into the stretch of ground between the next.

But his luck has not held, or the gunners have improved.

The first round harmlessly strikes his helmet, and the second shreds the top of his pack.

And then the third, fourth, fifth thrust him back, he drops his rifle, bleeding from his hand, his side, his neck-

* * *

He can barely walk as he stumbles along the line, seeking mercy, and the hands are once more held out, and the two girls on the end separate to lurk near the gravesite and await their orders-

* * *

Incredibly, he keeps his feet.

He picks up his rifle and he staggers forward.

The side of his left knee fountains; he buckles-

* * *

And now the two grasp him by either arm and haul him, his feet going limp, and the legs failing rather dramatically, toward the menacing wood, toward the little grave, he flails with either pain or performance, his face terrible-

* * *

The private takes another bloody step, for God's sake, but the knee will not support him, and the return barrage takes him now as he lurches forward onto one knee, and suddenly he is tossed and spun nothing like those propaganda films would suggest-

* * *

She steps out to the side of the corps, which snaps its arms up jauntily, to meet that final flourish of the instruments, and smiles.

She can smell him dying offstage.

The audience, enraptured, bursts into applause.

She does hope Elijah will be pleased with that; she thought it was quite inspired.

How _authentic_ the death throes, the audience will say. This double threat of dancer and actor will not soon be replaced when retirement at last claims his youthful bones.

No, she doesn't think so.

What a pity.

She floats her arms out to graceful first position and smiles more brightly.

* * *

Nik returns in September, when autumn is well under way, and the Neva each evening is foggy with her wintry portents. The men have shuttered themselves inside thicker coats, and the women's hats have sprouted soft fur round the rims. She can smell the trees dying, and that boletic underlayer of the fallen leaves which perish anonymously somewhere underfoot.

That silly war is still raging; she hears about it occasionally in society circles when she has not chosen carefully enough and her companions are consumed by such stupidity. Yes, yes, humans square off over one bit of land or another and plink away with whatever technological marvel weapon's manufacturers have lately thrust into their hands; it's happened before, she quite assures you. History is dull like that. Humans are perpetually inventing, yet never novel.

She has Nik settled into the Youssopov's Moika Palace where Finn and Kol can be stored with sacrosanct anonymity in the cellar, trims his hair, takes down the horrid trench beard to the tolerable stubble which the twit imagines gives him that pirate-like air of 'dashing' and before which the mortal and immortal alike prostrate their keen genitalia.

"You're an idiot," she says crisply, but will now condescend to be seen in public with him.

He wears a natty great coat and turns heads all through the prospekts and, arm in arm, escorts her to a production of _Eugene Onegin_ where they meet up with Elijah, who engages Nik on the topic of his adventures in France. She yawns rudely. "How fascinating. You rolled round in some mud for half a year. Very farmyard animal of you."

"Sweetheart, the men are talking," Nik says, because he knows it will infuriate her.

She breaks his opera glasses and hurls them at the head of some woman to whom he has been paying attention in between positively fascinating diatribes of billets and machine guns.

Poor thing; right through the skull. He won't be yanking on those pretty curls anytime soon now, will he?

" _Bekah_ ," Elijah scolds.

"You've been here half a bloody day and you haven't said a word about my dress," she snaps at Nik.

"I don't care for that color on you," he replies, and Elijah grabs her arm and says "No," firmly, before she can send him after the glasses.

The production is halted by this unexpected death and the guests left to mill and exclaim while the policemen puzzle her crushed skull, and somewhat appeased when Nik takes her hand and dimples at her, she smoothes the yellow silk over her knees and fusses for a moment at the low neckline. Elijah amuses himself with the sound of his own voice; he can pontificate on any ridiculous topic which is of no relation to her even longer than Nik. Listen, then, to him stir up these corpses of bygone dust whose eloquence outlasted their scrolls and which brats must be made to yawn over in those interminable school years when Homer supersedes Poirot. There is a Sophocles at least once a century, and an Ovid in the next, and each sharpens his pen a little more, and from the shoulders of his successors farther penetrates the horizons of man.

And to sit, and quibble over his poetry, to hotly consider meter, rhythm, and the fastidious placement of his _Os_ and his _thines._

She rolls her eyes.

She touches Nik's arm. "There's your host," she leans in close to tell him, discreetly indicating Prince Felix, who is impeccably suited, and sans his wife. "That's the Youssopov heir, Felix. Interesting man. Rumor has it he likes to dress up in his mother's clothes and will wet himself in anything with a hole in it."

Nik cocks his head.

She can tell by the way he studies the man that the long lashes have intrigued him, and the soft pink cheeks aroused him; there is a languid air to the prince which suggests opulence, that close cousin of the vice. He is hatless, the dark hair slicked back from his face so you can admire it from every angle.

She leans in once more. "The man beside him is the Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich. He's in love with our friend Felix. In the carnal sense." She smiles. "You might want to pull on a few threads somewhere in that general area. The Romanovs will feel the reverberations all the way in their cushy little Winter Palace."

She sits back in her chair, and drapes her hand lightly over Nik's forearm with a smile.

* * *

 **A/N: The battle Klaus and his dear friend Enzo are fighting in is the first battle of the Somme (in fact the first day of that battle), which was an unmitigated clusterfuck for the British forces. My descriptions of the battle are largely drawn from Martin Middlebrook's 'The First Day on the Somme' and the firsthand observations detailed therein.**

 **Also, the quotes from Tim's terrible, terrible erotica are taken from Olivia Outlaw's 'Tempting Duty: An Isle of Bliss Romance'. No, I will not stop working in as much bad porn as is humanly possible.**

 **Up next: more Klaus vs. Enzo, Caroline begins teaching again, Kol/his bats (the greatest love story of this entire series, truly), and more of what is going to be a long flashback that I hope you're all prepared for, because let me tell you, I have read a lot of Russian literature and have rather a major boner for not only this time period, but Russian culture in general, so prepare yourselves for Jenn's Giant Russian Boner.**


	2. Part Two

**A/N: So, here we are, the second part of this final fic, to which the usual warnings apply: here be sex, obnoxious allusions to classic literature, and also irritatingly long history boners. Also severed heads (and hands). I'm not going to say too much here except to cite a few quotes. I'll stick my history notes at the end of this update, so you can read my comments on the flashback there if you'd like to.**

 **"Thus with feet imposed does love press his head" is from an Oxford World's Classics collection of Propertius' poems, translated by Guy Lee.**

 **Quoth Marshal de Saxe: 'The human heart is then the starting point in all matters pertaining to war.' This quote is from Ardant Du Picq's 'Battle Studies: Ancient and Modern Battle'. De Saxe was a Saxon soldier in the 1800s who eventually became Marshal General of France.**

 **And 'season of mist and mellow fruitfulness' is from Keats' 'To Autumn'.**

 **'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of any number of years must still be in want of adulthood.'** **This is a play on the opening line of Pride and Prejudice, which goes, 'It** **is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.'**

 **'O Spring! You are a letter that I write to her' is a quote from Les Miserables.**

 **Also, I have written in real events that recently happened in Egypt within the last few years, but I have fudged the dates a bit; most of the upheaval I describe took place in 2013.** **And Bab-al-Hara, which the boys are watching at one point, is a historical Syrian soap opera that is extremely popular throughout the Arab-speaking world. I did some poking around the internet to find soap operas that would be known and broadcast in Egypt, because I can totally picture Enzo and Kol getting completely caught up in them.**

* * *

 **Alexandria, 2014**

She stops bursting into Kol and Tim's room when she flings open the door one day to find Kol tied naked to a chair, Tim mid-backhand.

"Hello, darling," he says casually.

She screams.

She is, in that afterward clarity provided by trauma, at least 86% convinced this was a set-up; Tim once blushed at a bra on her bed, but merely looks up from bloodying Kol's lip with the politely inquisitive eyebrow lift of a homeowner fending off a Mormon. Have a Nice Day But Kindly Fuck Off, his eyebrow says.

"Warn a bitch!" she yells, and slams the door.

She commandeers a room in the Library of Alexandria and begins, here and there, to pluck potential students off the streets; the boys, predictably, ensconce themselves in the back of her classroom and are aggressively horrible pupils. Enzo puts his feet on his desk; Kol's habitual response to "Ok; any questions?" is "Will you take off your shirt?"; and Tim, she finds, starts playing little practical jokes on her as his comfort level slowly increases.

She sits them all down one day when the rest of the class has already disappeared, standing with her arms crossed in front of the chalk board on which she has illustrated all the tastiest (and least fatal) zones of the human body. "Somebody keeps moving all the stuff on my desk. And also rearranging the pens I spent an hour categorizing by type and color. It's you." She points at Tim with all the gravity of Zeus casting the fatal bolt.

He obliges, jumping.

"I didn't do it," he insists, fussing with his hat.

"Yes you did," Kol says in unison with her own incredulous snort.

"You rat bastard." Tim kicks him under the desks.

"Really? You didn't do it? Because Enzo was with me when it happened, and when I looked back over the security cameras whoever did it was careful to keep out of sight. If it was Kol, he would have waved at every single one of them and also probably shown me something I can never unsee."

Tim squints up at her from beneath his hat, ruffling the hair at the nape of his neck.

She narrows her eyes at him.

He's the only one who will sit politely in time out, so the next day she sticks him in the punishment corner with his back to everyone else, quietly obedient, until Kol starts throwing bits of paper at him and he retaliates with what she realizes suddenly is one of _her_ notebooks and up to the front of the classroom she frantically click click clicks to holler, "Stop being gay!" at the top of her lungs, and the bits of paper gracefully snow the floor and the suddenly open mouths shut noisily, one by one, and Tim freezes mid-flick and carefully replaces his hat on his head.

Her students stare.

She takes a deep breath.

"Ok, I didn't mean for that to come out as gross as it did. No matter what anyone or your government or whatever has told you, it's ok to be gay. Just not in my class, ok? Because you're here to learn. And that means listening to everything I say, not flirting with your boyfriends or eyeing the cute foreign boys which I _totally_ noticed you doing, by the way, Halima, during page four, paragraph thirteen of _As I Lay Feeding_."

"Cute, by the way," Enzo drawls, lacing his hands behind his head.

"I was personally holding out for _Crime and Punishment: Except Not Really. Have Your Cop and Eat It Too_ ," Kol cuts in.

" _Moby Dick; or, Your Experimental Centuries_ ," Tim adds, looking pleased with himself.

"I'm _talking_!" she snaps.

"I don't think you were, gorgeous," Enzo points out.

"Well, I was going to. So everybody shut up."

"May I use the toilet?" Kol asks.

" _No_."

"Tim ate my homework," he says, leaning his chin on his hands.

"Seriously, shut _up_ ," she demands, and then she notices that Tim is kind of shuffling awkwardly around in his seat and not looking at her and she slams down the book she is holding and snaps, "Did you actually eat his homework?"

"Sorry," he says, looking genuinely repentant.

" _You're_ supposed to do the demonstrations! How am I supposed to use you as an example of how to vampire if you _eat_ the humans you're supposed to bring to class? We're working on _control_. You know, like not actually _murdering_ our meals?"

"In all fairness, he was very tasty," Kol says.

* * *

They like to walk the street markets in the afternoons when the hot winds have not yet wilted the leaves in their stands, and the shish kebabs are fresh off their grills, when the chicken still dissolves right from the stick and there is the bright after pop of the tart raisins and the cinnamon's hot jolt.

Enzo trots along at her side prepared to eat anyone who so much as stares a vague threat in her general direction, and when Kol has vanished off into the crowds she has Tim yoked alongside her as well, not smoking like a good boy because she has well had her fill of it, thank you very much, but walking along with his hands in his pockets, watching the faces around them.

When Kol pops back into their little circle, he and Tim usually walk on ahead together, laughing at something while she holds court with Enzo and Rebekah in the rear, stopping frequently so she can taste the various street foods and Rebekah can elegantly molest her chosen scarves until she has selected the softest and most expensive of them all to burden Enzo's sweating neck.

He is wearing four of them and carrying another over his arm when Rebekah finally disappears down an alley for a snack; Tim and Kol are barely visible through the crowd, Tim's head bent down toward Kol and one arm around the neck that barely reaches his shoulder.

"Are you ever gay sometimes?" she asks Enzo, watching them.

"What?"

"Sorry; just, you know, small town Southern girl. I'm just wondering how this all works. It's kind of weird to think you just…stop caring about gender eventually. You don't have to answer. You just always seem to go for girls while everyone else basically flips a coin. Penis, not penis? The toss decides it." She can see Enzo smiling out of the corner of her eye. "Sooo…what's the deal with you?"

He has this broody moment; she doesn't see it very often with him. She thinks, sometimes, he's convinced he's supposed to be happy; he's supposed to uplift the people around him. He's supposed to be this empty vessel: not Enzo at all, but all the little preferences and quirks people heap over the top of him, because who wants to love a person, that takes work, that takes compassion, you have to dig and dig, and just hold your nose past the bad bits until you excavate the good, you don't want blood, bones, those old depositories of ancient ash which at a stir are an ex-lover and a dead brother: why blow the dust from already used goods when you can superimpose your pedestals from which a toe dare never plunge?

She puts her head on his shoulder.

"I only loved one man," he says. "He was all I had."

"Did he die?" she asks softly, grabbing his free hand.

He doesn't answer for a long time. "No. He left me to die."

She lifts her head from his shoulder.

He smiles tightly down at her. "They just don't make loyalty like they used to, gorgeous."

She touches his stubbled chin, and the smile changes: love him, oh love him, it says, and she used to know a girl like that.

"What's there to cry about, gorgeous?" he asks, but gently, and puts his arm around her.

"Nothing," she says, and wipes her eyes on his shoulder. "He's a jerk, whoever he was. Do you want me to beat him up for you?" she asks, and they smile at one another.

* * *

She doesn't confront Rebekah about the dreams.

She opens her mouth to, once when they're having massages at a spa just outside Alexandria, and then she shuts it.

What's it like, to only know love like that; you are: a pair of breasts, legs, cultured fingernails.

She blurts: "Enzo likes you," which she so totally maybe should have kept quiet, but he's, like, another decade shy of making his move and she gets they're all immortal here, but seriously, why stand to the side of the dance floor and awkwardly shuffle your feet with those abs and that accent?

There is the whispered slide of the masseuse flipping the sheet.

The room vaporizer breathes its lavender sigh.

"Really, Caroline," Rebekah says.

"What?"

"Am I your ugly friend?" she snaps. "I hardly need you to scrounge a pity date for me."

"You are such a jerk, firstly. And secondly, I'm serious! Are you freaking blind? He's basically been following you like a puppy this whole trip, and you're like, ah, yes, here's my hanger again, jolly good, don't wrinkle that scarf, by the way, it needs to hang, not be scrunched up round your throat like that."

"Your English accent is terrible."

"No more than the way you treat him."

"If he wants to carry my things, who am I to turn my nose up at an eager bellhop?"

"Why the hell do you think he does it in the first place?" she demands, shifting against the table.

"He's naturally servile. He carries your things, too."

She pauses, opens her mouth, shuts it once more. She can feel Rebekah's smugness from here. "Ok, fine, maybe I am also a jerk who has occasionally taken advantage of his eagerness to please, but at least I actually acknowledge him in other ways!"

"How equal opportunity of you," Rebekah drawls, and then just fluffs the hair at the nape of her neck and goes completely still beneath the sheet once more, conversation finito, just like that, and on behalf of Enzo and how hurting him is basically like kicking the world's cutest puppy who has already been kicked and still wags his tail and thinks you're just super, she throws one of the heated stones the masseuse places on her back at Rebekah's head.

* * *

Kol walks right into her room one evening holding a severed hand.

"Excuse you!" she yells, leaping off her bed.

"I need you to keep this for me," he tells her, setting the hand on the table beside her bed.

"That's a _hand_!"

"Very good, darling," he says, and lifts one of his legs to roll his foot playfully at her. "And this is a _foot_ ; hand with toes."

"Don't be a jerk. Why do you have a hand, and why are you bringing it into my room still _dripping_ , I might add?"

He flops down on the bed, scissoring his arms and his legs so he takes up as much space as inhumanly possible. "It's for Tim, so obviously I can't keep it in our room, or else he'll see it. It's a surprise."

She pinches the bridge of her nose, and for a moment thinks surely, surely, this is what Elijah has spent ten long centuries disappointing his way through. Bless your heart, she thinks with Southern menace, and crosses her arms. "Please tell me that's not, like, your anniversary present or something. Do you guys even have an anniversary? I mean, do you even remember when you met? It had to have been a billion years ago or something."

"May 3rd, 1915. Officially," he says. "Nik was banging him long before that, so he was around."

"Kay, could we not talk about that? Hand. Explain."

"It's a gift. To match one I got for him while we were in Ireland. He did throw that one away, which rather hurt my feelings, but it was the thought that counted."

"Why don't you get him a normal present? Flowers or whatever?" She stops, works her mouth a little in thought, touches one heat-wilted curl contemplatively. "Ok, he's probably not a flowers guy, but I'm pretty sure there are better options."

"Should I bring him a whole person?" Kol asks. "We could keep them in your bath. I could flourish the shower curtain for the big reveal."

"No."

"The closet?"

" _No_."

"You know, you're not very supportive."

She sighs. "Why are you getting him a present? Did you do something?"

He presses a shocked hand to his chest, and gasps dramatically. "Darling, that you could accuse _me_ -"

"Seriously, no," she interrupts. "I have seen your brother pull that exact expression before, so no. Just stop. Did you do something?"

He folds his hands behind his head and one foot slips off the bed to toe the carpet with one pass, another, a little shurr shurr shurr during which he expertly schools his face, and she realizes, stunned, that he is, in fact, embarrassed.

"It's just because. You know, I'm glad…he came back."

"Ugh ugh ugh. I can't believe I am about to say this, but that is so sweet."

* * *

So she helps him with his big romantic gesture even though she afterward has to move hotel rooms and in her expert opinion the whole thing really probably should just be burned to the ground and she suddenly remembers during one of their trips to the markets that she promised Kol she'd meet him for drinks and murder and darts away to leave Rebekah and Enzo awkwardly faced off over a falafel cart and on Tuesdays she takes the train back to Cairo to wander the Egyptian Museum where the walls softly whisper back her lonesome footsteps and 160,000 dust-salted antiquities sail her gently on away down 5,000 years she will never walk.

He follows her the first time, maybe for her safety, maybe because he is lonely; she never sees him; of course she never sees him.

But he's forgotten how to walk so the after ripples do not grab the throat, and radiate down the neck. He's forgotten, you don't always need presence, you don't have to take up so much space, there is no allotted number of people who must look up with a frown and think oh yeah, oh yeah, that guy- he's someone.

He's been good, so she doesn't scold him. Enzo is not sans his head, nor Tim missing a knee cap. Kol is, if not exactly relaxed, then less twitchy, and he laughs more.

Rebekah does not talk about him.

So he tiptoes after her like some ghost who is, if not exactly benevolent, neither malevolent, and oh, the big jerk, what he probably wouldn't give, to stand shoulder to shoulder with her before the Faiyum Portraits elaborating almost shyly on their techniques.

And she goes back.

She puzzles over the Arabic labels, trying to ignore their English counterparts. She stands humbled before the polished yellow statues of Amenhotep III and Tiye as museums always shrink a person, who is, solo, one insignificant speck among those great movements of history. Fifty centuries of death agitate her nostrils and creep down her neck and in her belly she feels those faint stirrings of premonition that ice the spine: for fifty more this will happen all around her, death reaping, and the little people falling like wheat. You could say, she's practically a child: she always knew she was going to live forever.

But she can touch the faded sarcophagi and contemplate not the morbid bitch slap of future fates: thus shall you too lie; but pause, startled, and remember: mom did what she was supposed to. And Bonnie before her, and daddy, and Tyler. And she's always going to be standing here, looking down.

She can imagine herself back to Cleopatra's scented milk bath, with the fresh rose petals like garnishes on her eyes; and Waterloo's slippery charges, when the rain sank artillery and hope alike; and the poor gut-shot boys of Confederate youth, crying into dust and shit. Before and before and before: her books are full of them. You can snatch them fully realized straight from the page.

But after, after: that murky vacillation of future Carolines, wiser but no older. She can't see those.

When she stops for too long to linger over one display or another, she thinks she can almost see him out of the corner of her eye. He's wearing gray, she thinks, and his curls are carefully styled into that casual riot of unconcerned bedhead: oh, who me? I'm just naturally this hot.

She's so _tired_ of being angry at him. She has nursed something hot and hard and unyielding through months and countries and museums and she never wanted it like this, half a year not of inevitable head buttings and angry wall sex, but enforced silence, the hardest of all to break. He has been punished too much, or never enough: she can never decide.

But she doesn't call out to him.

She comes to the museum every Tuesday, 9:00 in the morning; she spends precisely three hours with the exhibits; she eats in the cafeteria from 12:00 to 12:30.

On the third Tuesday, she gets hit on by one of the cashiers. She's not sure exactly how to say, "Ok, so, I'm pretty sure my crazy boyfriend is stalking me, which, don't worry, is actually kind of his way of being romantic, he's not going to hurt me, but you he will ritualistically murder, so maybe find another smoking foreigner to try out your English pick-up lines on", so she tells him off in the aggressively rude Arabic that Tim taught her once when he was very, very drunk.

He'll probably still get ritualistically murdered, but she tried.

Kol, Tim and Enzo meet her at Ramses Station with a donkey and baggage cart they have stolen; they're not sure precisely why. It seemed the thing to do.

She does scold them, but probably not as much as she should; the donkey is _really_ cute, ok, and it tickles when he eats carrots out of her palm.

Kol rides it through the station like a crazy man, popping up into a handstand right on its back, which apparently even Tim never knew he could do, so of course for the next hour and a half he limberly acrobats his way through this crazy circus routine and, when he has tired of that, tries to teach Tim how to do some of it, which provides him with another good hour of entertainment to the delight of the watching crowd and the lesser enthusiasm of Tim, who cracks open his head on his final attempt and staggers up cussing such a streak even the donkey looks taken aback.

On the fourth Tuesday, she sees him in the reflection of a glass case, and her heart stops.

She does not look up quickly enough.

But there is a man following her, not a vampire, some broad-shouldered human, foreign, with an Australian accent she heard earlier when he paid for his ticket. He very carefully does not look at her. There is a studied casualness in his case to case slink.

He smells of wood.

He will not make it out of the museum alive.

When she sits down to her 12:00 lunch, he is already gone.

 _I can take care of my own hunters_ , she scribbles on a piece of scrap paper from her purse, and leaves it under her tray.

* * *

On the fifth Tuesday, there is a note on her favorite table: _I know, love. But perhaps we could take care of them together, say, around 6:00 this evening?_

You could frame his handwriting.

She crumples it in her hand, and throws it down on the table.

But he's found a chink, and he knows it.

* * *

He is more often reflected in those display cases, and if she stubbornly does not turn, it stubbornly does not dissuade him: _Do you come here often_? his next note asks, which he probably thinks is pretty funny.

 _What's a jerk like you doing in a place like this_ , she writes back, and then rips it up, because he is, after all, still an asshole and she doesn't find him cute or annoyingly charming at all, and she is certainly not thinking about how long it's been since he's touched her hair with that careful reverence, when you can tell he's never handled anything so softly.

She brings a copy of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poems that she stole from Tim and pages through it at lunch; when she leaves for a brief bathroom break, she finds a copy of Keats' poems in its place.

 _If you're going to read the Romantics, sweetheart, at least sort the wheat from the chaff._

* * *

She shows up on a Friday, just to annoy him and maybe throw him, because she had to lie to Tim about how she's pretty sure she saw Kol with that book and he was playing some kind of crazy fire game and she'd love to talk but actually she has a standing shopping date with Enzo on Fridays for slutty underwear, which scares him off further questioning faster than this one time she almost got caught sticky fingering Dostoyevsky's _The Idiot_ and in a blind panic she flashed him. He blushed all the way to his ears and walked right out of his own room without another word. It's pretty handy, actually; she now employs the girls in all emergency situations involving Tim. Thus far she has stolen three books and also successfully blamed that one accidental drowning on Kol.

He is neither annoyed nor thrown; he leaves another note: _That scarf matches your eyes as well as any material item can be expected to poorly imitate such a color. ;)_

 _Stop using emoticons. You are way too old to do that. It's like getting a text from your parents with the word 'ur' in it._

She's only gone for maybe a minute, just long enough to pick out another dessert, but somehow he slips another note under her tray, and is still nowhere to be seen when she reaches her table once more.

 _:) ;) :O :'( :D_

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of any number of years must still be in want of adulthood.

She rolls her eyes, and trashes the note.

* * *

Quoth Marshal de Saxe: 'The human heart is then the starting point in all matters pertaining to war.'

And so it is.

A society need merely be dissected: the human heart lies there at its unchanging center, where you will find that to plumb any man, you discover merely the same innards. Brother man may change his clothes, doff or imitate his neighbor's habits, sow his lands with different seeds, and into the world send his children with those ideals of novelty which only a human could persuade himself of possessing, but he need not embellish himself: Homer has long unearthed what he considers new-tilled, and Genghis Khan trampled what new freedoms he thinks to bedeck himself in.

He is simple, then, and his lands and his freedoms tremulous: has he feasted on Content, and Prosperity fattened his belly and shod his children; does he loll about in his shackles, or chafe them at the wrists; of his most base necessities does he partake regularly, or does he instead nurture a hole for a belly, rags for his soles, clothe himself in lice, shelter under dirt?

The 2011 revolution has left Egypt uncertain, fumble-footed: frail society of cliffside shale, what mere jostle will send you Mediterranean bound!

It takes him a few days to polish the Arabic which long centuries have rusted; haggling in the markets well eases his somewhat stoppered tongue.

But honey from an unbearded foreigner hath an alien taint: he chooses from one coffee shop a youth of that age when the fire is hottest and most undiscerning, and sends him out among the crowds of Cairo to decry General Abdel. Hear him beat the sword to his chest, and with roses in his cheeks thunder humanity's most well-worn drum: do they not scramble for tourist coin, and walk lightly where the government says they may, sans even their stick, while the president reclines in palaces of rime and riches? Do not winter breezes calm his lotioned toes, and his neck creak beneath aught but golden coronet?

Man riots easily; his inner foam is always at a simmer; the smallest storm will breach its calm.

Cast long your shuttered lamp, Erebus.

The news channels drop any nonsense of that vampire business in Europe and the States in favor of recent local troubles; but don't worry, loves, he'll come back to that. For the moment this clamor subsides, speculation vanishes, the hunters he has whiffed roil for a moment and are, grumbling, reduced to their usual hunting patterns.

On Tuesdays he goes to the Egyptian Museum.

On Wednesdays he for hours at a time carefully prowls his own hunting grounds, seeking seams, and determining who shall yield to kindled breast, and who meekly pump his fist in sham solidarity and slither back to his taxi.

He does long for that Camille woman on hot nights alone in his hotel, when he has but a few books and a sketchpad or two to amuse himself. He forgot her somewhere in New York, poor thing; anyway, she'd outlived her amusement.

He watches Caroline stumble through her beginner's Arabic and exclaim over the museum displays and enjoy her lunch with an infant's relish; what he must have missed from country to country, as she touched them each with her questing fingers and to their strange tongues applied her own in halting fervor.

Thus 'with feet imposed' does Love press his head.

He memorizes the folds of her scarf, and recalls the curls which are merely hinted at; the skin, fresh as Juno's moon; so do old fools muse, whose wits have outwitted themselves. Love, perhaps, is no errant fate; and mischievous Cupid laughs behind his bow: to so tumble the mighty.

He murders the hunter who stalks her into Tutankhamen's exhibit, and leaves him for the others to find.

When on a slow Tuesday she looks over her shoulder with a frown on her face, seeking, seeking, his heart jolts pathetically and he looms over her shoulder as she turns back to one of the displays, panics, vanishes before she can turn back.

He starts leaving little offerings at her favorite table: once the book of Keats, afterward a scarf to match her dress.

Once, a letter which he snatches back and speedily vanishes into his trouser pocket before she has turned from the cashier.

To cut oneself over a page, and bleed and bleed: of course he is no stranger to these missives of tender expression.

But she does not deserve to have his regret so distilled; to place a barrier between them, to allow himself the consolation of pen and paper, which are no mean judges but fair peacemakers, to so excuse himself- he has perhaps lost a brother to similar cowardice.

Oh, to be iron before a cannon and shudder before a girl-

He wipes his hands twice on his trousers and follows her.

And so he minces about after her, these long afternoons.

* * *

He continues to prod the hornet's nest, and watches with satisfaction.

Mankind always assumes himself to be an inventor of the wheel; his pride does not accept that he is a mere imitator of seasons past, and revolutions already failed.

These street gatherings of provoked youth and fed-up elderly are conducted with that peculiar zest of first spring, when the buds are yet virgin and the old man feels himself up to another year, his bones springy with new rain. Dusty August has scoured most of the tourists from its resorts, and huddled the rest inside to worship at their air conditioners; he walks among the protesters, pale, naked-cheeked, scarcely noticed.

Some of these demonstrations come to blows occasionally, and once exasperated soldiers open fire on a small group engaged in pelting them with stones. A retaliatory car bomb in Cairo kills half a dozen.

He spots Tim once among one of the protests, hands in his pockets, keeping a hawk-eyed vigilance on the proceedings. A rock bounces off his hat; he thrusts out an arm to shield Caroline, who pops up suddenly beside him.

He does suppose the lad will have to be kept alive after all. Shame. Kol would surely have tired of him eventually; Caroline will never let loose.

When a sudden flurry of violence stacks up, as it is wont to, one on top of the other, nearly bottle-necking in its eagerness to surpass the previous day, the government declares a daily curfew; at least 36 Christian churches lay in ashes, and nearly as many police stations before the day is out. In Cairo's Nasr City district, the finance ministry building smolders eerily. So does the discontent peasant reap what his government has sown.

He likes to walk these little demonstrations in the evenings, when Apollo's chariot has retired and political injustice not merely another water to be steamed off; man is at his feistiest when he has wiped his boots of his job and come home to children even worse than his customers.

Kol's latest spree attracts an assembly of hunters, but Caroline is not present, so he allows the shootout between them and Tim.

She likes lonely after-curfew walks: to stretch the limbs beyond their limits, to confront man's shadowy beasts that lurk those haunted corners of elderly buildings, to revel, simply, in past frailness and to recall ah, yes, never will I ever be inflicted with man's infirmities- ah youth, youth, how it does test its teeth, and so upend past victimizations.

She murders three young men in one night alone: O Spring! You are a letter that I write to her.

He returns home after one such enjoyable outing to find that Enzo prat once more in his hotel room.

He's lounging in one of the chairs this time, legs draped irreverently over the arm. "Hello, mate," he says in the sort of voice which men have been murdered over.

He slams the door. "Get _out_."

The leg swings lazily; one arm hinges over the knee. He unconcernedly drinks from a water bottle in his hand. "You might be wondering how I keep finding you: it's easy. I simply ask myself, 'Where would a self-entitled prig with over compensation issues choose to stay?' And here you are, mate." The boots which are nonchalantly dirtying his chair are upended, and duly examined: "These have gone to rubbish. You walk enough markets with a gorgeous blonde, they're bound to suffer, I suppose." The peeling treads are wiped on the bedspread which is spaced within convenient stretch of the legs.

He tightens his jaw.

He decides, for the sake of Caroline, who is for some reason apparently enamored of this creature (there is no accounting for most of her taste, but she's young, after all; distinction will come) to extend that affable olive branch which man calls a joke. Let her not say, then, that he didn't try.

"God rest their soles," he replies, and what rage this man might inspire cannot, at least, override the warm joy to be found in cleverness; he smiles.

Enzo blinks at him.

He tilts his head. "Unsurprisingly, this appears to have passed right over your thick head. _Soles_ , mate. S-o-l-e-"

"I get it," Enzo interrupts. "It's just not funny."

He escorts Enzo out by the scruff of his neck, smacking his head several times on the door frame, and is dismissively laughed off: a slow count of three and the image of Caroline which he has faithfully immortalized save the man's head.

* * *

But he's back, of course, as any pestilence will simply run its course regardless of man's timely intercession.

He moves once, twice, thrice, and is simply found and found again by this gnat, whom he interrupts once in his shower, and once more paging through his sketchbook.

He rips it from Enzo's hands. "I understand privation is not given to privacy, but regardless what dirty urchin used to thumb through and ultimately pass up your meager belongings, we do not touch that which does not belong to us."

"You shit in a ditch too, mate. No secrets between a couple of old army buddies, yeah? By the way, that nude study of our girl- very nicely done. Breasts are a touch off, though. I hear."

"From _who_?" he roars before he can rein himself in.

"Seems Tim has been privy to them a few times. Ah, ah, ah, mate- let's not look like that." Enzo leans forward to playfully tug at the patch of beard sprouting under his lip. "Remember: Caroline's been in at least two bar fights with him. That's a life bond."

He rips Enzo off the bed by his ankles and stomps on his neck; the limp body is afterward conveyed to the skip where it belongs.

* * *

"I found your tumblr blog on me," Enzo tells him amicably one day, over a kebab stand.

He walks to the next street cart, exercising some of the most surely admirable restraint mankind has ever practiced.

Enzo follows him, snatching one of the kebabs from its grill. "I'm flattered."

"Do you really think I'd waste my time on a social media account dedicated to _you_?"

"Really? You aren't lorenzomorelikepoorenzo? Sideblog Nicholas Sonof Michael? The one with all the puns and the posts slagging off Hitler's speeches?"

"He _stole_ several of mine," he snaps, and abruptly shuts his mouth.

Enzo taps him on the forehead with his kebab. "Check your blog, mate."

* * *

Enzo has somehow, in between occupying himself with a lack of nose breathing and scratching his lice, managed to hack the blog.

There are several photoshop jobs: a 17th century painting of himself in which it now appears that Enzo is kissing his forehead while he gazes with dreamy content into the eyes of this intruder; the one of him with Stefan, who has now been supplanted by Enzo; and another which in the original showed Rebekah posing with an arm around his waist and her head on his shoulder and which now depicts Enzo in her place.

There is a post just above this sequence of pictures: **mate don't make your password caroline.**

* * *

Two days later, there is another sequence of pictures and another post:

 **don't make your password forbes and her birthdate either bloody hell**

* * *

Understand, she's not lonely.

She has friends. She has _friends_ ; for almost twenty years she never really understood what that meant. A friend is someone you love with a dog's faithful gusto; never mind your master's fickle tenderness, which comes and goes with mysterious arbitrariness.

Elena helped her with her pre-Homecoming lipgloss and advised her on shoes and said with that strange blend of gentleness and brutality with which she always thought all friendships were conducted, "Caroline, I don't think that's really your thing" whenever she expressed an interest in anything outside of shopping, and a small part of her used to say, there has to be more, and the far larger part of herself replied, shut up, bitch, not for you. And so she practiced her best Miss Mystic smiles, and when she stayed up until 3:00 in the morning chewing over Aristotle's _On the Soul_ , she told everyone it was a late night _Twilight_ binge and made some inane comment about Edward's ass. Not for cheerleaders the contemplations of man's inner clockwork.

But she gets into a discussion on Heidegger with Tim that turns into an argument, and not once does he tell her to shut up, or pat her careful curls, he debates her like a reasoning individual, and she thinks oh, _oh_ , and at 4 am on a random sand dune she starts to cry about her mother and Enzo puts an arm around her and doesn't remind her about that one time he lost so much more: tiptoe by tiptoe does she advance on understanding.

So she's not lonely. She goes out dancing and for long midnight walks through centuries of philosophical evolution courtesy of Tim, who likes you to know he is more than just a pretty face, and Kol, who tries to pretend he is not, and Rebekah who misses her brother, who loftily says she does not, starts 'accidentally' falling asleep in her room once more, curled up on the covers in front of their latest movie night.

She walks in on the boys one day to find Tim sprawled in a chair beside their bed, his feet up on the mattress, book in his lap; he pokes Kol every so often with his toes and smiles. Kol and Enzo lie, rapt, on the bed, chins in their hands, watching Bab al-Hara. Tim translates distractedly every so often for Enzo, whose Arabic is extremely shaky; Kol is too absorbed to bother.

She gets this fullness inside her.

These idiots.

So this is love; no need for the tender fingers in sleek whisperings along your spine.

But one day they're walking through Cairo's Tahrir Square and she's not eavesdropping, so she doesn't hear it, but Kol says something that makes Tim laugh.

And he just loops his arm around Kol's neck and pulls him onto his toes so they can share the sort of kiss where you're just all smashed up against one another, foreheads touching, noses squashed, not something that's supposed to cater to polished camera angles: something you can't help. Something you just _do_.

People stop and stare.

But you don't notice that.

They pull apart, but stand with their faces close together, talking. Tim laughs again, and kisses Kol between his eyebrows.

And she feels this…bottoming out.

She loves him.

Sometimes she's sorry for that.

But she loves him.

It's like…her stomach is the look on Tim's face. There's one person; there is no spinning planet. There is no jostling crowd with its elbow in your ribs; the hot dust is mere fantasy. It just freaking twists her: you can miss someone so _badly_ it hurts worse than any physical violation.

"I don't forgive you," she says one afternoon at the museum, without turning around. "But pretend you don't know me. Pretend you're some douchey stranger who gets his freak on lecturing visitors on the last three thousand years of art history and how it evolved from Cleopatra's fetish for self portraits or whatever."

He doesn't come out for a while, like he's pretending he's not there.

She keeps strolling from exhibit to exhibit, waiting.

It's like the air shifts when he slides out from behind one of the columns. It's like she can breathe more easily.

"They're panel paintings," he says, quietly.

He doesn't touch her.

He stands three feet away, with his hands behind his back. There is so much longing in him, it's like another person between them. What a stupid, stupid jerk, she thinks, and maybe tears up a little.

The mummy portraits have been unearthed all across Egypt, but are most commonly found in the Faiyum Basin; these 'Faiyum Portraits' are generally a stylistic distinction rather than a geographic one, however, he tells her, and then he pauses with endearing first date awkwardness, and she breathes, she remembers: she still kind of wants to punch him in the face.

But he is cute when he's sharing something about which he feels passionate. He's like a nervous little boy: he wants so badly for you to love it just as much.

She wonders if Mikael tried to beat that out of him. Artwork is for weaklings; love for something even worse.

Sometimes she just wants to tell him, it's ok: it's so, so frightening, but it's ok. He's carried it around inside of him like a shame for so long.

But she doesn't say anything; she just listens to him talk. She likes his voice; she's forgotten that, a little. Not because it's smooth; not because there is in it the cultured silk of the aristocratic Brit, long captivator of American hearts (and loins): it cracks a little when he talks now, and once he runs two of his sentences together.

She tries not to smile.

He's so careful as he lectures: the distance is cautiously maintained, and the hands kept innocuously behind his back, like he doesn't know what sudden movement or misplaced word might startle her back out of his life. He has to sneak all his looks; little sidelong glances she is not supposed to notice, but she's always going to notice that: she's always going to feel the weight of him.

She could have run for a thousand years.

She could have put…so many years and loves between them.

But it's the boy; it's the girl and her answering heart, who smiles first this time.

He stops talking.

He stands with the three feet between them and his hands behind his back and he looks up into the eyes of these long dead predecessors, and sometimes you can see, if you know how to look, if you care how to look, how he staggers: all these great mysteries of time and mortality, which cooperates for only those forgettables of human history whose bones were never arbitrarily bog-birthed.

She takes a step closer, so she can see the painting from the same angle. "Do you ever walk into a museum sometimes, and see yourself just…staring back?"

He stands there silently for a long time; she can hear his hands nervously chafing one another, and that twitchy unstillness a human would never catch: all the subtle little shifts of thigh seam upon thigh seam, and the settling of his toes in his boots. He's breathing too fast: he always forgets to regulate those prey-like tics around her, so she can hear the blood in the pale undersides of the slender wrists, and the heart panicking against his ribs.

"There's a museum in Iceland; in Reykjavik. They have some of my mother's loom weights and the toys I used to make for Kol and Bekah when they were little."

"Did you take them?"

"No," he says, still staring at the portraits. "Kol was dead. He died…loathing me. I didn't think he'd want me to have them."

She clasps her hands behind her back; angles her head to the precise position of his. "I don't want to praise you for just doing the decent human thing, but thanks. For leaving him alone. Little by little, you're gonna' get there."

"If this is a marathon for my humanity, Caroline, I'm afraid that race has already long been run, love. I veered off into the bushes and ate the frontrunner."

" _Yes_ , for your humanity. Not for your civilization, not for sitting across a dinner table from someone and deciding not to eat them, they're only an innocent- for the thing humans are supposed to have in them and sometimes I think they're slowly starting to breed out. The part of you that you look at someone- you look at them and you just love them so much. And when they smile, you don't want to destroy it for the way it makes you feel. It doesn't have to be some kind of sacrificial altar -your love or your dignity, one's gotta' go- _no_. You don't get stronger ignoring what you've carried around inside of you for a thousand years. You love your family; you love me. I know you do. Accept that this something you've carried around in you for a thousand years? It's never going to go away. There's still a brother there who used to so completely dote on his younger siblings. He wasn't weak: weakness evolves out. And he's still here, ten lifetimes later."

He looks over at her and smiles, the bashful one she knows isn't contrived. "Rah, rah, siss boom bah, I believe is the next line?" he says, and does that innocent eyebrow lift that is so gently mocking she wants to grab him by the ears and kiss him blind.

"You just totally ruined a really heartfelt speech. You were probably the guy in the audience booing Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech."

"It was admirable but ultimately naïve."

"You're pretty much despicable."

"Ah: 'pretty much'. Do I sense a crack in our unwavering resentment? Ought I to mount the hill now with sword drawn?"

She squints at him. "Was that some kind of freaky nineteenth century innuendo?"

He smiles; wolfishly, this time. "It can be, if you like."

"Nope," she says, and sails on out of the room.

* * *

So it's a dance: it always is with them.

She gives him an inch, and heaves him right back to the starting point when he tries to take the mile.

But on Tuesdays her smile is brightest, and her scarf most carefully selected.

* * *

On the tenth Tuesday, the Muslim Brotherhood storms the museum and takes seventy hostages.

* * *

 **Petrograd, 1916**

St. Petersburg suffers a wet September, and in October mists carefully masks its frosts so that the undiscerning long forgets the Neva's prophetic ice. The Horseman presides in slick triumph, flourishing his great legs which are in this century a bit greener, a bit more worn with that unsentimental pumice, Mother Nature. These gently exhaling barges who cough their soot at intervals which powder the sky and soil the Neva appear with the clamorous spontaneity of old Marley.

He likes to put on his best coat and walk the prospekts early, before the sun, before those human stirrings of factory-bound unfortunates; there is sometimes a persistent prostitute or a cabbie with ten children to sustain who pursue with surprising deftness this elusive customer, but mostly he is accompanied by the eternally chuckling Neva, fat with rain.

Troubled Mother Russ, who brews thunder in her streets and lightning in her drinking houses, did she not for too long encourage Father Tsar, and now at his meekest promises Elysian fantasies to her hungry youth? Does his stump bleed coin, will he be quartered for bread, can you in a palatial coup or back alley betrayal sow your barren fields? Will his bones fill your coffers, and his entrails nourish your children? Petersburg, Petersburg, weary of war, bereft of your best, what gain from hot breast, which foresees no future surrogate and thinks only of short-burning fire?

Most entertaining, though.

Royal tea proceeds each day without change: same bread, same biscuits, same polished samovar; Lady Nastasya, less intrigued by Fokine's dazzling _Firebird_ than her lover, flirts her fan skillfully; somewhere Russia's valiant officers are murdered by German guns, but anyway, that libretto is simply flawless. What mire flounders and defeats these distant officers is no unpleasant reflection in gilt railings.

He is, occasionally, still amused by such ignorance. To miss the raised pitchforks on account of the matched gowns and the imported slippers, to pass the queuing mob gaily in the rattling cab, to think offhandedly to oneself, oh, silly peasants (as Bekah would say), to be stunned, imagine, by life's most consistent constants: death and the vengeful peasant.

If humans are not entirely creative, they are, at least, entirely stupid. What fool past centuries have perfected future decades will inevitably surpass. Never say man halted in his (d)evolution while unwearied onward march his machines.

On a gray Monday he takes a cab to the outskirts of the city and on foot continues to the edge of an atmospherically thick and menacing wood. The clouds have begun to gather more threateningly when he slips into the trees; once inside, the weather is immaterial; the wood manages its own perpetual gloom. Here the sun is a mere fable, and summer merely a warm dream spun by dying fires. If all winter's fatal annoyances can be summarized, they are here described in this wood that at a glance ices the spine, and paralyzes the heart.

He does enjoy that touch. Afanasyev's most stout-hearted Ivan surely would balk at a wood like this.

Perhaps ten minutes in the wood flares out into a little clearing whose sole inhabitant is a hut on gnarled chicken legs; it crouches silently beyond its fence of human bone. There is an empty pike and beside it a new acquisition still bleeding from the neck; wonderful theatrical instincts, truly.

He stands outside the hut and links his hands behind his back, smiling. "Little house, little house! Stand with your back to the woods, your front to me!"

The house shifts; there is a pause, and then slowly the entire thing revolves.

He steps through the door.

"Fie, fie, fie! Until now there was no smell or sight of a Russian soul. Are you doing a deed or fleeing a deed?"

"Visiting an old friend," he replies, and the door rumbles shut behind him. "You've looked better, love."

Crude, but he assumes it really does the trick; the rickety legs have been slung over the stove, and the long nose grows into the ceiling. The dripping nostrils dangle their snot precariously over the threshold. The breasts, elongated and flattened with age, have been tossed up over a hook; she sharpens her teeth casually as he takes off his hat.

"Do you like it?" she asks, and the harsh croak has been abruptly smoothed into a close approximation of his own cultured accent. She likes, she once told him, the creaminess of the English accent; it's wonderfully snobby. And anyway, certainly it's good enough for that German whore which Nicholas' youthful ardor has crowned.

The legs slip from the stove; the breasts shrink and lift; the nose is suddenly retracted. She's very deft; he almost misses the transformation. When she steps naked from her rags, it's quite the fairytale hat trick: from blistered beast to stunning tsarina.

"Nikolenka," she says, and kisses him on either cheek; her breasts press rather than brush him. He'll forgive the crudeness, in light of her attention to detail regarding the hut.

And they are marvelous breasts, after all.

He dimples at her.

Propertius' powdered Cynthia, slender of limb, with a maidenly cheek stain worthy of its immortalisation, holds no mere candle stub by comparison. One well sympathizes with Paris, in confrontation with a face such as this.

"You haven't brought your brother?" she asks him in English, with only a faint accent. He follows her into the back room, where her workroom resides. She's laboring over some new formula, he can smell; something with arsenic in it.

"Kol is elsewhere at the moment," he lies smoothly. "You know how he likes to flit about. I believe he is currently somewhere in Asia."

She looks at him. "You believe," she says, and laughs at him. "You believe nothing; you know." She sits down at her work table without bothering to so much as wrap herself in a sheet. The long white legs cross; the black hair falls coquettishly over her breasts. "Your timing is excellent; Petrograd is poised on the edge of revolution."

He smiles and lowers himself into a nearby chair. "So I observed."

"And you're here for information about it."

"Where else would I come?" he asks, lifting his hands out to either side. "Grigory Rasputin. Is he a warlock?"

"Yes. Not a very powerful one, though. A few parlor tricks; that's about all he can be credited with."

"And these Bolsheviks?"

She leans back against the table, a sly pose; it arches her back, emphasizing the breasts. "You'll have to pay me for that information. I don't know if one of you is enough, though. You ought to have brought your brother."

"Can I interest you in my sister?" he asks, dimpling again. "I believe you enjoy blondes?"

She uncrosses her legs.

"I wasn't aware you had a sister? Why didn't you tell me about her sooner?"

"We had a bit of a falling out; we were estranged the last time I was in Russia." He slips off his jacket. "Someone's approaching the house."

"Yes; that would be Ivan. Well, I call him Ivan. I don't know his real name. Who cares; anyway, I caught him poking around the house one day, and now he's mine."

"Little house, little house," he hears from the front yard, and the hut gives a shudder.

She stands up and brushes the hair from her breasts. "Ivan," she calls out, and a curly-haired young man enters; he sees why she kept him, indeed. The shoulders are knotted beneath his shirt, and the waist perfectly proportioned; if the nose is a bit crooked, the eyes eclipse it, and the lips more than make up for it.

He smiles up at the young man as any knowing predator sizes up its prey.

"You are joining?" she asks him. pulling Ivan toward the bed in the corner with the finger she hooks into his waistband.

"Oh, no; not this time, I think. But please; proceed," he replies, and seats himself in a chair to watch.

* * *

Bekah (stage alias Nina Alexandrovna) is a revolution; Petrograd society adores her. Anna Pavlova's London-cast shadow has been quite firmly supplanted, though he does overhear the inevitable comparisons with great amusement: Bekah has more than had her say about this 'clod broomstick' whom three years have neglected to vanish from the Russian stages and the patrons' hearts.

He takes Lizaveta to watch her perform in The Sleeping Beauty, as the fair golden-haired Aurora, of course, though he thinks the wicked Carabosse is far more suited to his sister's rather bristly temperament. But to Carabosse and her minions goes only a brief act and much theatricality but little dancing: not for our most luminous stars so limited a spotlight.

Introductions are afterwards made while Bekah is still in costume and 'sweating like a horse', as Kol would point out with malicious delight. Both women eye one another with that calculated suspicion of great beauties; Bekah will right now be attempting to tabulate how much of her brother's attention must be divided between herself and this interloper, and Lizaveta whether this delicate-looking blonde is truly as enchantingly depraved as her brothers.

Bekah will be, if not entirely enthralled with her, at least delighted upon discovery of what happened to the girl's family, and if she has rather fewer dalliances with women than he, still she is no less appreciative of that softness peculiar to them, and the pleasures which dandies in particular live in haughty ignorance of. He has need of only a wife: what need he of a pleased one? Does a man ask that his 18th century empire mahogany dressing table be gently petted, and all walk softly around it, or does he require merely a layer of polish, that it might be worthy to adorn his house?

The girls have decided to stop circling one another; Lizaveta has acquitted herself satisfactorily, for Bekah has an arm through hers now. They have a similar vein of casual brutality which those long years of fluttering Victorian heroines have assured man does not exist in such pretty creatures; those decorative and still dripping fixtures which fence Lizaveta's hut might beg to differ, but let a man hold to his chintz fantasies of mucky gray reality: it does keep him going.

Bekah thus distracted, he is free to proceed.

* * *

First: to parse those murky half-truths which all tongues weave about aristocracy.

The young Tsarevich Alexis Romanov is afflicted with hemophilia, he finds after much inquiry and compulsion: few even within the inner circle are in fact aware of the heir's vulnerability. And thus opened the crack for Grigory Rasputin to slither through: in this holy impostor has the drained mother placed all her faith and fate. On this finicky seesaw, trust, then, does the dynasty teeter, and her starving, war-stricken children eye Alexandra Romanova, German whore, spy, traitor with that hollow-eyed cunning only true privation can replicate.

Rasputin is universally reviled, and, consequently, universally fascinating. Shaded with those delicate confections of lace and silk behind which the ladies shield all their secrets are whispers of the hypnotic pleasures to be had in his bed; the pomaded and perfumed dandies of Petrograd have little allure, beside this stinking peasant and his eyes, those 'two phosphorescent beams of light melting into a great luminous ring which at times draws nearer and nearer and then moves farther away', as related to him by young Prince Felix. Parlor tricks, as Lizaveta dismissed them. But to the naïve human, divine power.

There are rumors young Youssupov is a former lover of Rasputin's, perhaps refuted and perhaps confirmed by his utter loathing of the _starets_ ; more interesting, however, are the rumors which surround Youssupov and his companion, the Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, first cousin to the Tsar himself.

Petrograd society is rather proudly scandalous: affairs are plentiful, and the gossip surrounding them more plentiful still. Young Youssupov's past 'proclivities', then, are whispered staples of the well-informed. A beautiful young nobleman's influence is far-reaching, and his youthful errors contagious: so assume those concerned family members who bite their nails at those salacious rumors of a dandy's frolics, and mercilessly brood over how far the stain and the shame shall set. Some years ago, then, came an order from the palace itself, forbidding Dmitry from the side of his prince, which you see to this day has been summarily ignored; if Felix were a fresh babe, and Dmitry his conjoined brother, they could not be closer yet.

The three threads, then; or shall he call them marionette strings?

He finds it easy enough to befriend both men; another charming young dandy, Youssupov assumes, and adds him happily enough to his stable of acquaintances. A fellow rake, Dmitry supposes, and is similarly welcoming.

If the ration lines stretch longer, and the arms are more insistently taxed for their bread, Petrograd's upper echelon scarcely notices; is there a war on, then, he might ask round his cigar: just dreadful, she might conclude with an affected shudder. His brother man might perish in the mud, and mother Russia yield another son to distant wood; but war is a peasant's game, save for those rare and noble officers, and ought to be accorded similar notice.

Felix is no military man, though his backhand on a tennis court might be called similarly brutish, and Dmitry is caught more often with his head up his skirt than his hand round a gun; but as any idle young gentleman must be proficient in his various lazy pursuits, they are imbued with enough education and interests to at least mildly entertain him. He passes several pleasant conversations with them in various restaurants and drinking establishments; Felix is London educated, and his English nearly native; Dmitry has a slight thickness to those first and second languages which a foreign tongue must sometimes wrestle for its mastery, but their conversations being conducted in a mélange of Russian, French and English and the Romanov heir well able to keep pace, he must be excused for any fleeting roughness in his contributions.

Gossip declares Felix generally reformed, and a genuine husband and a fond father. Marriage is, after all, an instant curative for that insidious illness, homosexuality.

Likelier: young Felix has shed his mother's clothes, and the coquettish smiles which from beneath lavender crape beckon forth young officers of the Imperial Guard; his eyes, limpid, fair, a luxuriously lashed inheritance of his mother, follow still those paths of handsome youth which cross, innocently enough, the horizon of this rapt watcher. One can droop the eyelashes indolently enough, and miss nothing.

Dmitry's tastes are harder to suss, in these early days of companionship. The prince is clearly his sun; the day rises and sets upon their meetings; there is no fresh courtship between an officer and his apple-cheeked maiden with more stars in its eyes.

But there are occasionally those male friendships which bypass all sexual undercurrent and are destined for more gentle tendernesses: a brother could not lay more softly in his elder's arms, and with less lasciviousness. He has seen such a bond between those men whose muskets have chained them, and which the mud forever adheres. He sobs in his companion's dead arms not for want of kisses, but because war has forged that precious after-birth umbilical, and suddenly severed him from it.

Dmitry is undeniably a rake; promiscuous, frequenter of brothels; a legitimate admirer of female beauty.

But likelier still than Youssupov's relapse into sodomitical sin is that the men, despite the prince's restorative marriage, are having an affair. There is just enough clandestine touching any less careful eye might easily bypass; no weighty double talk is there in a hand on the shoulder, but the last time a man contrived to bump his knee, or briefly touch the gloved hand with such regularity was a Hungarian count with whom he was conducting a torrid affair until the man's ironic death at the hands of an enraged brother who insisted he'd compromised his sister.

October is no ideal season for it, but the prince takes them hunting on the grounds of one of his many estates, and for several miles they wander with the dogs loping gamely along, and their guns over their arms. Winter has yet to make her lion's entrance, and on a good day their romps are a prophetic page from one of Turgenev's Sketches: tenderly blue, the willows polished, the delicate red grass crisp but not yet vanquished underfoot.

The woodcocks are most partial to old lime trees, and are regularly flushed out by the eager dogs, right into the fatal shots. Felix, always resplendent in those colorful overcoats to which Oscar Wilde surely would have penned an ode or two, hands them off to a servant to be deposited in a game bag.

He brings along his sketchbook for those moments of idleness after the picnic hamper has been properly emptied, and the tea finished, when the flamboyant Youssupov heir stretches out his long legs, boots elegantly crossed, and drowses in the autumn sun like any coarse peasant. Beside him, Dmitry reads silently from whichever work of Gogol's has currently engaged his attention.

The limes are his favorite subjects; the frosts have murdered them in their boughs, and so provides that perfect contrast of living sky, sickly grass, bested citrus. Cyclic wonder: the emaciated limbs will in a mere season or two transform once more to that sturdy green wicker, and the flowers presage a flourishing crop. The rye, straighten its anguished back and wave cheerfully to those playful spring gusts. Oh, do not lament this 'season of mist and mellow fruitfulness'; Mother Nature, she doth gift with both hands.

"You're a master," Dmitry says to him one afternoon, admiring a landscape over his shoulder. "That belongs in the Hermitage."

He smiles up at the lad.

Nearby, Youssupov sleeps on.

"Thank you. Interesting reading?"

"Mmmm. I prefer his short stories, frankly, but I don't think Gogol penned a truly poor word." Dmitry returns to his novel, his eyes flicking for a moment to the toe of Felix's boot, which has drifted against his calf.

He waits for Dmitry to become absorbed once more in the text, and clicks his fingers for the servant. "Take the game bag back to the estate and remain there for the rest of the afternoon. You're unnecessary," he says in Russian to the boy, dredging up the slangiest phrasing he can recall. Dmitry's Russian is a bit shaky in regards to the peasant dialect, and anyway, he appears truly involved in his book.

A lingering stare into the boy's eyes, and he turns and rushes off into the trees, pelting back toward the miles distant estate at a good clip.

"Now where's he gone off to?" Dmitry asks, raising his head with a sudden surprised snap. "That was odd."

"I haven't a clue," he says innocently. "Seems a bit flighty, though, poor lad. What can you do." He sighs heavily. "Good help is so hard to find." He picks up his charcoal once more, and positions his hand. For a moment, he and the boy eye one another over the slumbering body between them.

Dmitry turns once more to his book; he begins his next sketch.

But the eyes shift back to him from time to time, to the overcoat he has unbuttoned, and the collar he has loosened against an unseasonably warm day. He returns the glances demurely from beneath his eyelashes, which the light hits at just the precisely correct angle to illuminate the blonde in them.

Of the duke he has revised his opinion: undeniably a rake and legitimate admirer of female beauty.

But so too does his gaze follow the finer of the officers and their sleek moustaches.

Certainly the duke is attracted to him; he has eyes.

He lets the glances simmer for a while, until Dmitry has not turned a page in a good five minutes, and the leg he has crossed lazily over the other twitches in agitation. A fly settles noisily on the page of the sketchbook; a shake of the pages encourages it elsewhere.

"Would you like to see what I'm working on?" he asks innocently, pretending to misinterpret the stares.

Dmitry startles. "Ah…that's all right. If you haven't finished. I was only drifting off."

"Come now. I highly doubt your thoughts were among idle clouds, hmm?"

Dmitry blinks. "I'm sorry? Pourriez-vous répéter cela?" he asks; his French is better than his English.

He obliges, replying in French. "We are grown men with no eyes on us. Is there any need for this sort of coquetry?"

Dmitry cocks his head, and bookmarks the page with his finger. A faint smile crosses his lips beneath the well-maintained moustache. "I had no idea Englishmen were so forward. I was always of the impression they were…" He twirls his hand idly in the air.

"Yes, yes; born with a rod up our asses. It explains our stately postures." He smiles, keeping the sketchbook on his lap, and with his hand idly describing the beginning lines of his next work. He looks down, drawing out the moment and the tension, and ensuring the eyes are nowhere but his face. "If you haven't read so much as a line in ten minutes because you're that invested in my drawings, I'll eat both our hats, mate."

He looks up once more, from beneath his eyebrows, not tilting up his chin, so there is now a sort of menacing promise in his smile.

Dmitry swallows.

He glances back toward the trees into which the servant disappeared, and next to the peaceful Felix, still quietly napping.

"I think perhaps I might have a better subject in that pond a ways back. The one with the rushes round it. An artist needs privacy, after all," he says, and stands up with an elegant stretch, arching his back with exaggerated pleasure. "As you were," he tells the duke, dimpling.

The stroll is a pleasant one; he divests himself entirely of his coat, carrying it over his arm. Petrograd will be knee-deep in snow soon enough, but the countryside is still mild, and he loosens the stiff collar another notch, to feel the sun on the back of his neck.

He has only a few minutes to wait, and then Dmitry walks casually enough onto the bank beside him, hands in his vest pockets. He spends a moment looking out over the pond, as though they are both not overly aware of why he has come.

The beginning, of course, is always the most delicious frisson: just setting his hand on Dmitry's knee excites both their breathing.

"Undo your trousers," he says, in the sort of tone Romanov heirs are not well accustomed to hearing, he imagines. For a moment Dmitry startles, and opens his mouth for what must surely be a reprimand.

He grabs the boy's chin, roughly. "Undo your trousers. Mate." He does not kiss him; better to let the breath quicken against the red lips and the oiled moustache, to let the anticipation mount between the threat of embrace and the actual culmination of it.

The hands pause for a moment, and then with shaky expectation undo the buttons, and draw down the zipper.

He pulls Dmitry's cock out, and slowly, with feathery tenderness, runs his thumb up the underside of it, and over the tip, letting off after just this one teasing pass.

"Relax; this is going to hurt a bit. Just for a moment," he says, and slides his tongue up the boy's neck to his earlobe, which jerks a low cry out of him.

He grabs a fistful of the boy's hair, and tilts his head for the choicest angle.

When he bites him, Dmitry cries out; his back arches; the tip of his cock brushes the hand he has braced against the front of the boy's hip. "What are you doing; what are you _doing_ ," he gasps.

"Shhh; shh," he soothes, brushing the bangs from the suddenly sweating forehead. "Forget your little hang-ups; does it feel good?"

Dmitry pulls a shivery breath in through his nostrils; touches the hand on his hip. "Yes. Yes," he breathes, and clenches the wrist of the hand on his hip in a grip that would powder a mortal's frail bones.

He lays the boy back in the grass.

He doesn't touch the boy at all, but for that first slide of his hand along the fat cock.

He works the ravaged neck with skillful teeth and tongue for twenty nearly unbearable minutes, if the boy's shaking and pleas are anything to go by, and then the smooth tip of that cock suddenly nudges him once more as the boy's hips strain up off the grass and he comes all over his belly with a breath like a sob.

* * *

He is nonchalant toward the boy for the next several days; the untended fire poses two risks: to peter out completely, or rage uncontrolled beyond the grate.

Of course, he has judged the duke aright, and upon their next outing, Dmitry himself dismisses the servant once Felix has dropped off.

In the long grass beside the pond, he takes off both their shirts, and presses himself close to the boy, so he can feel the warm belly skin upon belly skin, all the little shifts of the muscles in his stomach as he breathes, the twitching of his cock through his trousers-

He kisses the boy's nipples and lingers over his stomach, just around the waistband, so that his breath slithers down to the sensitive skin beneath, and hints at pleasures to come.

He lets Felix nearly stumble upon them, kissing Dmitry's cock through his trousers just as those footsteps at last register upon the duke's thundering ears, and he jolts up to scramble into his shirt with mere seconds to spare.

* * *

He has other engagements when next the lads come to call for their routine hunting trip.

* * *

A mere week out from November, the weather is still holding; the trees are a bit poorer for it, and the limes a little more shriveled, but the snow yet bides its time, and they cross once more the brittle red grasses to the familiar groves, muffled in scarcely an extra layer. Dmitry is, in fact, sweating beneath his own coat and scarf, and spends most of their walk preoccupied with wiping droplets from his eyes, lest they spoil his aim.

He waits impatiently with his book open for Felix to drift away into his customary nap, hardly pretending to read it.

Scarcely ten minutes after the pale eyelids have drooped, and the long hand relaxed on his chest, Dmitry bids the servant return with their game, and starts up from the blanket upon which they are all sprawled.

"That's rather a long walk," he tells the boy, leaning back on his elbows, and looking up at him pointedly.

He does spare a look for his sleeping prince, but is not long in deciding.

Dmitry straddles him, already hard.

The boy seizes great tufts of his hair in both hands, and kisses him so hard their teeth knock together.

Dmitry merely ruts against him, no finesse, a desperate sort of copulation in which there is not time to surmount even the barrier of their trousers; he lets his head fall to the broad shoulder, eyes fluttering.

The boy's fingers tighten in his hair as he comes; the moustached lips are pressed to his temple.

He opens his eyes to find Felix watching them through half-lidded eyes.

* * *

Upon their next outing, he finds the servant missing.

They walk past the usual groves and have penetrated far deeper into the trees, hampered by raspberry brambles, when Dmitry finally whistles and calls ahead to Felix, who is in the lead, "Yousoppov! Where are you taking us?"

"There are snipes farther in," Felix responds. He is carrying the blanket and picnic hamper himself today, and has handed his gun off to Dmitry. He sets a brisk pace, though it is not audible in his voice.

Perhaps an hour into the dense wood, he suggests they stop for lunch, and the blanket is spread out, the hamper set untouched off to one side.

"Come on, Dima, so distant; take your nose out of your book and come lie beside me," Felix suggests with a lazy smile, lying back himself so that his hands his handsome dark head.

He's very good; he must have snared many a lady and her lord with such artful subtlety. There is no indication of what he intends to a mere human, who cannot smell his arousal or note the slight dilation of the eyes.

Dmitry lies down quite innocently beside him.

For a while, they are left to their respective thoughts and hobbies, he sketching the curve of Felix's jaw, Dmitry faking interest in Tolstoy.

They are complicit in this, he realizes, catching the prince's eye, and with a smile closing the sketchbook.

When he bends down to kiss the pretty lips, soft as any woman's, the prince's hand comes up to cup his neck, and idly stroke the hairs there. They leave their mouths open; Felix, to his young credit, is an excellent kisser, who does not advance too soon with the tongue, and when he presses its advantage at last, teases with the tip instead of thrusting with amateurish enthusiasm. It's the sort of kiss you feel all the way down into your spine; they are quite some time at exploring the other's lips, artist to artist, one of the delicate white hands which has never known a day of any labor it does not choose sliding into his lap.

He pulls away to gauge the reaction of Dmitry: thunderstruck; the book falls from his knee.

The hand in his lap does not pause when the prince rolls toward his friend and in releasing his own neck, slides the long fingers over the nape of the startled duke. Dmitry is guided in lingering bewilderment to the damp mouth.

He unzips his trousers; Felix's slender fingers find his bare cock.

He watches the two men kiss through half-lidded eyes, smiling.

When the prince releases his friend at last, they collapse into a lazy sort of tangle, the legs and arms thrown this way and that, the nimble hands taking their time with those accouterments of nobility behind which the supple backs are demurely secreted. Youssupov has the waist of a woman; Dmitry, the shoulders of a mountaineer.

The sun shifts overhead.

The breeze walks its sensual fingers up his spine.

He throws his head back, digging his hands into the hip in front of him, and with unhurried thrusts sliding his cock between Felix's thighs.

* * *

Alexandra relies entirely upon Rasputin for her child's safety; the Duma, naturally, resents him with equally consuming passion.

History is rather neatly stacked, one event on top of the other; it always has been. Isolation knows no worse bedfellow. If Ferdinand's hapless assassination could not, in all its incendiary magnitude, be the sole striker in that following Armageddon, certainly no shift in Rasputin's title or influence will bring this ancient autocracy howling to its knees.

But certainly you can pull the pin, and see which part of the mechanism suddenly falters.

* * *

Dmitry does not approve; Felix has been 'unmasked', as it were, once before, and ought not to press his luck.

But fine dresses which will not be recognized by that hawk eyed society who knows his mother's every crinoline are got easily enough; Felix is near enough to Bekah's size, and she won't miss a few absent silks.

Or, rather, she will, but he's left enough hints that it is in fact Elijah who has muddled about with her closet that his ears ought to be saved a sound blistering for at least a few days.

Entering restaurants with the prince on his arm allots him that instant admiration of a pretty wife; indeed, Bekah herself would be hard pressed to match him in heads turned.

They like to prowl the soldiers' favorite watering holes, sometimes with the prince in ringlets and flounces and himself holding court as the starry-eyed new husband who scarcely touches his vodka for his love sickness, sometimes with himself in complimentary silks.

Once they corner a pissed young buck who fancies himself the luckiest man alive, and leaves with them both. His surprise upon slipping under the skirts of these two charming 'ladies' is reiterated with language only a military man can boast.

He is, in the end, too drunk, too lonely, too afraid to not fuck and be fucked by them both.

With Dmitry he haunts the drinking houses and the brothels where the duke pays extra for them to be serviced together, roughly.

In separate apartments which the prince has retained for precisely this reason, they meet for hours, fucking one another like 'Catholic rabbits', as Kol might say. Unguarded pillow talk nets him those inner workings of autocracy which are only spilled at the will of sex or wealth.

Sometimes, he sits beside his brother in his coffin and reads to him. _Romeo and Juliet_ , generally; one of his favorite comedies.

The first time Kol saw it, he laughed so hard he accidentally rolled down the hill of the open air theatre and into the midst of it, to the great surprise of the actor playing Juliet, who had to hurtle him.

He smiles and pauses for a moment, stroking the overgrown bangs.

Elijah will have to see to those.

* * *

It is late November when he lets himself quietly into the prince's chambers at the Moika Palace. A morning stroll has brightened his nose, and pinched the tips of his ears; he's muffled both his hands in his coat. A reveal is terribly boring without the flourish, after all, isn't it?

Felix has on a dressing gown and is in the middle of his tea. "Irina is outside," he says. "Baby needs some fresh air, apparently." He lays aside the novel he is reading. "What's the matter?"

He lets his face blanch beneath its fresh December rouge; the hands he extracts from his coat are trembling.

Truly, he is marvelous.

"Rasputin…Rasputin has somehow come into possession of these. How they were got, I don't know. How many more he might have, I don't know either." He lays down a packet of photographs, fanning them open on the table for maximum effect.

Youssupov sips his tea, sets it carefully down on its saucer.

He is utterly silent for nearly a minute; he does not touch the photographs.

The long hands are folded on top of the table, one of the fingers smoothing a ripple in the cloth. "Dmitry-"

"Doesn't yet know."

The pale fingers work themselves between one another; he swallows visibly, but the face is otherwise unruffled. "And he's in none of these? His face, I mean."

"None of these, no."

Youssupov leans back in his chair and thoughtfully steeples his fingers beneath his chin.

"Might I suggest another motive for our friend Dmitry?" he asks innocently, fluffing the curls along his brow surreptitiously, so they frame the flushed cheeks and the bright eyes with cherubic artlessness.

"Another motive," Youssupov replies, without the inflection to make it a question.

"Rasputin will need to be disposed of, clearly. This will ruin you. Rumors are one thing, explicit photographic evidence another altogether. Perhaps your influence will keep you out of prison, but you'll likely be exiled. Shunned, at the very least. Dmitry, however, will not murder a man over a scandal, whatever the empress may believe of his other morals."

The long lashes blink at him, and drop in contemplation.

"If he could be persuaded it's in the best interests of his family- if he could be talked round to believing Rasputin is doing irreversible damage to the autocracy, to their influence…he could be made complicit. No one need know about these photographs except the two of us."

The fingers shift against one another.

The legs re-cross beneath the silk robe.

"Rasputin is a stain upon this country. Upon your honor. Your child will be besmirched by him. And who knows to what heights he will elevate himself, with these pictures."

One of the hands lifts smoothly, the features still blandly studying him. "You don't need to persuade me, Nikolai. Dmitry-"

"Is a reasonable man who has seen for himself the damage this peasant has inflicted upon the government." He dimples; not too much. No need to parade his triumph. When testing the puppeteer's strings, one must be careful not to jostle them so the audience is rudely transported from their fantastic tale to that mean reality of sawdust and tattered villager's curtain.

Somewhere in the house, a door opens.

They hear the incessant chattering of new children, and the answering fondness of the prince's wife.

He sweeps the photographs gracefully into his hand, and slides them into his coat pocket a mere thirty seconds before she enters the room with their child on her hip.

"Nikolai! I don't believe we were expecting you?"

"Just consolidating some theatre plans. Your husband is kind enough, or perhaps unwise enough, to allow me to steal him from such a ravishing creature as yourself," he replies smoothly, with just enough self-deprecation in his smile to flatter rather than offend.

He bends to kiss her hand, without letting go the prince's hot gaze.

* * *

 **A/N:** **Ok, so some flashback notes. You'll note that I refer to both Petrograd and St. Petersburg interchangably; as I explained in the last part, if you recall, St. Petersburg's name was changed to Petrograd shortly after the commencement of WWI, because it was felt that Petersburg was too German a name. (Teh ENEMY!) However, when Klaus was last in Russia, Petrograd would have been St. Petersburg, so I've used both names since the flashback is from his perspective and I feel he'd probably slip sometimes, not having had a couple of years to get used to referring to it as Petrograd. Plus, it's not like he has any political affiliations, so what does he give a shit if Petersburg sounds too German.**

 **The horseman Klaus notes is a statue of Peter the Great which you can still view today in St. Petersburg, if you're into really big fucking statues of dudes on horses. Pushkin wrote a poem about it called 'The Bronze Horseman', which we'll all be very surprised if I don't try and work in somehow.**

 **The hut in the wood which is home to the witch Klaus visits for information is basically just a big jumble of references to Russian folk tales: I told you you guys were going to feel my Big Russian Boner throughout this flashback. I'm not going to explain every reference because that would take too long, so I'll just say: read some Russian folk tales if you haven't already. They are, in the usual vein of undisneyfied folk and fairy tales, massively fucked up.**

 **Prince Felix's description of Rasputin is from his personal letters.**

 **'Turgenev's Sketches': a reference to Ivan Turgenev's 'Sketches From a Hunter's Album', a collection of short stories based on Turgenev's observations while hunting throughout Russia.**

 **Ok, so. Rasputin's assassination. It's quite the senstional event, honestly. The official motivation is a political one. However, there are suggestions floating around that Youssopov, who did not have much interest in politics and was unlikely to have been driven by them, knew that Rasputin had information about him which was damaging. In the aftermath of his murder, however, Dmitry and Felix had quite the falling out, and it's unlikely Dmitry would have loyally refrained from telling what he knew about whatever it was Youssopov had been indicated in, if he in fact knew it. I have, then, combined both motivations: Dmitry's being the political, and Prince Felix's the personal, courtesy of Klaus, and his deft little machinations.**

 **There are no explicit descriptions of the relationship between Dmitry and Prince Felix; there, were, however, many rumors surrounding the sexualities of both men, and their relationship in particular. Youssopov's cross-dressing was fairly well-known (he in fact talks about it in his memoirs), and he was indeed caught out at it after a restaurant owner recognized him and passed word along to his parents, who were like, "Hey, son, you need to knock off that gay shit." In his memoir, Youssopov also talks about a deep relationship between himself and Dmitry which hints at unions of a spicy, homosexual nature, but never makes explicit what their relationship actually was. As you see, I have opted for the really gay route. May I burn in hell for writing real person fic where they do it lots (they have been long dead, at least, and probably aren't going to sue me for this). Also, if history would STOP BEING SO GAY, I wouldn't have to do this.**

 **The real question, however, is what will Rebekah do when she realizes Klaus stole some of her dresses and spent several dirty, dirty sexcapades stretching them out and also ruining the fabric, because gay threeways makes for a lot of splooge, I'm assuming (having little experience myself with gay male threeways)?**

 **Tune in next week (lol, not really) to find out this and more! One highlight you might look forward to: Klaroline murder shenanigans. Because turns out the hostage situation at the museum is not what it seems.**

 **Thank you so much for reading, and also a great big thanks to those of you who nominated me for the Klaroline Awards! I do appreciate that you guys are still thinking of me, three years later.**

 **Jenn out.**


	3. Part Three

**A/N: So, the end is nigh. We have, at last, arrived at the penultimate chapter of this project. The next part of this fic will be the end of the entire series. Moment of silence for your collective sighs of relief.**

 **Historical notes will be posted at the end of this update. I know I usually do it the other way around, but I hate having this massive wall of text you have to either read or scroll through before you reach the actual story.**

* * *

 **Petrograd, 1916**

There is a light snow on the evening of the 31st.

In its midnight depths, Petrograd is no exhausted child, bedded down with the lashes dumbstruck on its cheek. The restaurants are in full swing; the cabs noisily sought and the trams merrily ringing; there lives at the same moment an opera lustily finishing, and a revolutionary mid-plot.

But here the Moika Palace presides over a vacuum. The snow falls silently. The house squats disapprovingly, eyeing the long white avenue. To penetrate this sacred space is to walk faster, and to trail its evils afterward, where they cling for long hours to the damp frock coat like beggar children. Cross yourself hastily, young believer: let not the devil touch that good and oblivious heart!

He lights his cigarette; the smoke matches the snow.

Inside the Palace, Rasputin has taken his seat in that dismal cellar room where he is to enjoy his last cake and to guzzle his last tea.

See with your ears: the eyes so often mistranslate those tricks of light which the brain takes for biblical candor.

How much the human misses when he sweeps his fallible gaze over such a scene and says to himself he has grasped it all in a pass, when his ears lay dumb and his nose mute and the hairs on his nape still unruffled. What events have we passed from mouth to mouth and from textbook to textbook that balance upon that tremulous seesaw, the eyewitness.

The snow blunts the fence tops, and weights his hat.

He shuts his eyes, smiling into his next exhale.

The fire is cheerful: compare its crackling to this soundless storm, feel how the heat encloses you, the cherries are stoked from your cheeks, and the frostbite from your fingertips, the fine dishes rattle faintly on their saucers, the tea alights with that musical plashing in the china.

You have stood and you have listened to the grinding of the poison from crystal to powder, an unearthly music, an alien delight: you have never before known what such a death might sound like. The cakes absorb this readily: they materialize with a reality sharper than any scene poorly translated through those mists of cornea and pupil. Plum-heavy, palm-sized: how easily the poorest of peasant teeth would puncture them, and sink, sink, pleasantly, dreamily, through those cumulous layers of flour and cream.

Rasputin whispers in silk and velvet; his arm describes each arc it takes, and the sudden silence of the journey ended before another delicacy. His boots creak with the uncertainty of these new owners, whose shape they do not yet understand and have not yet adjusted to.

The fellow conspirators wait nervously upstairs, simulating a party with the jarring notes of "Yankee Doodle".

The cheek of history! To give Stolypin Rimsky-Korsakov's 'The Tale of Tsar Saltan' -to give such a masterpiece to an aging prime minister who outlived his office, who outlived his usefulness, whose Tsar did not even mourn him- to see him off with such soaring genius! And the great holy man, God's most earnest pupil, his most beloved son- he is defeated to this tawdry background! His death knell is a tacky jingle on an aging phonograph!

He takes another inhale from his cigarette.

The snow has stopped.

Nature understands well the dramatic pause. So do the trees hold their breaths, waiting for this axe to fall before ruffling their leaves once more.

The cakes have been poisoned with enough cyanide to drop multiple men, and the wine similarly spoiled. You hear the silk slithering along the table and onto the cake tray once, twice, and the loud chewing: the _starets_ does nothing with the table manners of the company to which he often sidles up to and clings like a burr.

And yet, nothing nothing…no heavy thudding of the head on the table. If you were to press your ear to the chest, you would hear the heart thunderously beating and the lungs working unhindered.

What buffoonery assassinations are. A children's circus act, with the clown as their centerpiece.

The clock mocks: tick tock tick tock, one minute, two, a handful, and the corpse eats, he drinks, he makes merry: he wonders loudly when Irina will return from her party.

Soon, soon, Youssupov assures him, terrified. If the corpse's heart thunders with amazing verve, hear his murderer's!

The clouds are threatening, and block the moon, but wait, wait: it is not the right moment. The snow has laid its mantle, and muffled the city for miles, so when the strains of Yankee Doodle have finally dwindled, and the phonograph coughed its last, the deed might be remembered to this sinister soundtrack, missing its conductors, missing its strings, its woodwinds, its brass, with only the trees for audience, not trembling at all before the winter gusts but steady, steady, letting with strategic brilliance the lights out onto the snow.

The co-conspirators cluster above in terror to listen to Youssupov entertaining the _starets_ with his guitar; you can hear each individual sweat droplet if you lean in close enough. The doctor who has prepared the poison has already swooned once. Dmitry has chewed all but one of his nails. Purishkevich, culled from the Duma itself, taps his chin fretfully.

How do you kill a man already vanquished? When he drinks your poisoned chalice and inhales your doctored cakes and he smiles through a mouthful of flour and asks for a song- what weapon can you not blunt on his head and for your troubles receive merely another inquiry for tea? What Olympian has descended his peak to don the skin of a dirty peasant man and play these silly human games for as long as they amuse him?

Two and a half hours after Rasputin should have expired into his tea, Youssupov excuses himself. What ought he to _do_ , he wants the others to tell him. The good Doctor Lazovert, still feeling fluttery, is useless; Dmitry wants to go home; but Purishkevich, good man, steady man, he says: you must proceed.

And so Youssopov accepts Dmitry's Browning, and slips back down the stairs with it behind his back.

Surely you can guess at the sweat coating his hand.

You can imagine how the trigger will slide beneath such a finger: to face those eyes that should long ago have dimmed, to see the hand steadily putting away the compromised cakes and the deadly wine. To stand with a measly firearm before this 'man' in his new boots and his slithery silk who has eaten enough cyanide to kill ten men and complains of only a light headache.

Rasputin's breathing is heavy: at last, is this a sign? Has the heart begun to falter and the lungs to fail?

No, no; not so easily are our worst moments solved. He calls for wine; he suggests a visit to the gypsies.

Youssopov coaxes him from his chair and you hear, "Grigori Efimovich, you'd far better look at the crucifix and say a prayer."

And the scene materializes before your eyes: the shuffling silk, the wicked hush hush hush of the velvet pants rubbing sensuously along one another, the revolver hammer, cocked so surreptitiously surely Rasputin himself must not notice it, fogged as he is with wine. The crucifix will be elaborate, gleaming, it widens out and out before your eyes, which catch on the precious metal from which it has been carved and polished, you see nothing else, the jewels transfix you: so are even the icons of the privileged meant to dazzle and to distract.

How slowly, slowly (excruciating moment!) must Youssupov ease the pistol out from behind his back. If he recorded the event immediately afterward, you could not more accurately imagine it. The creeping hand, that wide back, the straggling hair, the smell of the _starets_ earlier preparations, that cheap soap with which he thought to impress the Princess Youssopov's staggering beauty…oh, how such a moment freezes, and is ever afterwards catalogued in even a human's unsound mind! That noxious cake breath, and the steaming samovar, the crackling fire, the warm plums melting a little into their cream, so for a moment the cellar is revisited by that sweet reminder of overripe autumn, with the fruit dying beneath its red leaves…

…and the shot.

Immediately afterward: a scream.

And then the clattering of those anxious conspirators down the stairs, so they can huddle over the downed beast and breathe for the first time since Rasputin took his first bite and went on happily to his next.

There is a silence after a gunshot.

It is much like these snowy avenues: you can feel the pressure of it on your shoulders. It is not a companionable silence; you do not walk with it in easy solitude, carrying a book in your hand.

It begins to snow again.

There is another scream: this one is different; angry, bestial; not a dying man's lamentation. He recognizes Youssopov's following cry, and then the frantic crashing of someone scrambling in pure madness up the stairs, when all reason has fled, and man has been reduced to all fours, scrabbling away at the treads, and then the shout: "Purishkevich, fire, fire! He's alive! He's getting away!"

Into the courtyard hurtles the _starets_ ; with a bullet in his back and poison in his lungs he sprints across the snow toward the gate where he stands smoking calmly. Purishkevich explodes out after him.

"Felix! Felix! I will tell everything to the Empress!" this agile corpse shrieks, and Purishkevish raises the Browning; he fires, misses, cries out, fires again, misses again; the trees are no longer silent. They ring with this public murder. The avenue eagerly shuttles the sound along to the river.

"Nikolai! Shoot him! _Shoot him_!" Purishkevish shrieks, and fires again.

Rasputin howls; he jerks forward; the bullet has struck him between the shoulders.

He has dressed for precisely this moment, in a black frock coat; he is nearly invisible beside the iron gate. The snow, it seems, has landed on a shadow, and finely dusts it into existence.

In his pocket he has a Webley Mk IV of which he is particularly fond.

When he removes it from his coat, slowly, so Rasputin has time to see the flash of it in the rare moonlight the clouds allow into the courtyard, he pauses for a moment. You can't rush these things.

The shot echoes sharply.

The trees flinch.

Purishkevich kneels in the snow with the sudden weight of his hope; the Browning slips out of his hand.

For a moment they stare at one another, immortal to immortal: Rasputin gnashes his teeth, frothing. He braces a hand against the snow and attempts to stand, but the legs thrash weakly, the head sinks back; he blinks. The snarl relaxes.

The snow falls.

* * *

 **Cairo, 2014**

"So, you're telling me Cleopatra is basically the most powerful head bitch in charge ever, and she-"

Klaus grabs her wrist.

She opens her mouth to scold him, because _rude_ , she was kinda' talking, and this is a Caroline Stop Your Face wrist grab, this is not a gentle brush of the veins, just to remind him, she's here, she has (kinda') living flesh, and the freaking heat, the rush, the pounding of her beneath his fingertips-

But she looks into his face and she stops: you can see all the gears turning inside his head. You remember at moments like these that he's not human: the Abercrombie model is just a skin, and underneath is something otherworldly. No slick underwear ideal focuses that hard, and seems in a moment to take in everything around you, so that the hairs lift on the back of your neck and you remember, you remember- your very lowest, muddiest days, those seconds and minutes and hours that just freaking cling to you- he can see them all.

She shuts her mouth.

She stretches out with all her senses, feeling how the air around her is loaded with those motes of antiquity that smell like death, listening to the whispering of all these people around her whose pants slither along their thighs and whose shirts rustle at their throats; into her nose creeps the daily menu, and for a moment she smells the bright melons, the heavy creams of today's dessert, that gleaming snow of the whipped cream, the cheerful lemon struggling out from underneath it, on, on, focus, focus, she gropes, gropes, gropes, out the door, into the honking traffic and the smog that is its own little perpetual thundercloud over Cairo, into the tourists and the click click clicking of their cameras, those crisp flaps of the sharply cracked hotel maps that unfurl at a single wrist snap-

"Klaus, what-"

And then two gunshots penetrate the horns, the tourists, the endlessly murmuring murmuring museum visitors around her.

Klaus drops her wrist.

"Well, this is about to get interesting."

Someone screams.

They're only one room over from the main entrance, and when the door is kicked in, it slams so noisily against the wall it nearly overwhelms her; she reels against one of the displays for a moment, covering her ears, sobbing for breath, and then the guns start up again, only she hasn't yet pulled back into herself, the ears are still open, and the nostrils subtly distended, she hears the reverberations find the statues, skip over the cases, jounce from mummy to mummy, there's the acrid scouring of the gun powder inside her nose, those scaling explosions of the shots, the screams, they're so _loud_ , oh God, _God_ -

Klaus pulls her down onto the floor.

"Don't do anything too dramatic, love," he says into her ear, and then she hears the animal stampeding of the screaming visitors who are skillfully herded into this room where several of them already cower, and the shrieking of their shepherds: they rattle off a long stream of Arabic she can't understand, and Klaus raises his hands in the air.

"Did you do this?" she hisses to him.

He looks _so_ way too chill for a man kneeling on a museum floor with his hands lifted in surrender. "Now why would I arrange something like this, love, when you've made it so very clear that I'm not to take one step without your express permission?"

"That's _not_ what I said, I was calling you out on being a megalomaniac pri-"

There is a gun shoved right into her face. "Up," the dark figure which looms over it demands in heavily accented English. "Up! Now!"

She looks at Klaus.

He lifts an eyebrow at her. "All right, mate, take it easy," he says to the masked figure, and rises slowly, keeping his hands in the air. His face is so smugly amused that for a second she wants to punch it; she can feel her heart hammering in her throat.

The man shoves at Klaus with his rifle barrel, prodding him toward the group several of his armed companions are rounding up in the center of the room, and she snaps, "Hey! Don't _push_ him!" and smacks the guy right in the back of the head.

For a moment, she thinks he's going to hit her: you can feel the expectant weight of it, touching your shoulders, your stomach, your cheek where the anticipated handprint already tingles and reddens. The world takes a breath, and lingers warily undecided on its next: some dramas are that loud. You can hear the roots wordlessly gasping into the loam, and the trees softly hissing an accompaniment; but the cars have reached this strange stalemate of the universal stoplight that has screeched them all to a halt, and the tourists stand dumbly staring from behind their maps so that you can hear all the way to the ocean.

The man stares at Klaus, who has turned to face him, just as aristocratically British as he was kneeling on that polished floor in his designer jeans.

She can sense his face change behind the mask; there's something about the way the skin around the eyes furrows. There's something primal in humans that in its own dumb, groping way, recognizes him: you feel him, first, along your spine, and next in the pit of the gut where all the worst things gather. But, no, no, your brain assures you, and the eyes leap in to the defense of this circa 1992 Brad Pitt: see how the bangs curl almost like a kid's, and the lips are so redly reassuring; 5' 10" at a stretch, and 160 lbs. in a storm.

But the _eyes_ , your stomach keeps insisting. He walks down your nape like…not like some basement creepy crawlie, skittering from the darkness to tiptoe in a Halloween creeping down your neck; he's not that mundane. He's not that innocuous.

It's like the darkness itself is some primordial clay that edges first a masterfully molded foot into the world, so you have time to wonder: what the _hell_ is coming next?

The eyes behind that mask flicker past Klaus, over his shoulder to the two other men who now look up from their own captives.

"They're not terrorists. They're hunters," Klaus says, and suddenly grabs the man's gun.

It discharges with a crack that raises a fresh crescendo of screams; she gets one hot mouthful of dust from where the bullet has struck the floor, and then she grabs the man by the throat, and bounces his head off the nearest display so hard his skull splits, melon-like.

Klaus shoots one of the other men; his friend has scrambled off somewhere out of sight.

He shoves her behind a statue of King Akhenaten as the third guy suddenly lets off a long stream of bullets; she sees all the little white stitches of the ricochets and then the huge gouts of dust, the whirling projectiles of all the cases and the statues he has struck and decimated: oh God, all that history, she thinks for a moment, and wonders how long Klaus is going to draw out each unpleasant death if they touch the artwork.

"How many are there?" she asks.

He steps out from behind the statue, firing confidently. He barely even glances at the gun to work it; it's like it just sort of comes alive in his hands, skimming first the man's barely perceptible hand, flashing out from behind one of the displays, and then the booted toe which for a split second is revealed and then hastily yanked back.

There must be at least a hundred people in here; even he has to think about it for a moment, sifting the heartbeats, thumbing his way through this one massive index of sweating, screaming flesh, seeking, seeking through all those little details of clothing fiber and scented throat hollow. "Twenty," he says. "Eighteen, now." He shoots the man in the head when for one rash second she barely even registers he pops it over the top of his display. "Seventeen."

" _Seventeen_?"

The gun clatters at his feet; his head tips in that assessing head tilt he does when he's taking in everything, when he is touching with his mind all the angles and corners of a situation, and from every perspective examining its smallest cracks. "They've wired the doors; you could get through one of them, but you'd be blown to bits, and staked before you could come to." There's that smile on his lips now: you might have seen it once, and only once. He holds out his hand to her. "Shall we?"

* * *

You forget how much you enjoy the stalking, when you live among humans and you breathe their same recycled air and you try, during those long daylight hours of societal scrutiny, to follow their rules. You are relegated to those dreamlike hours between midnight and 3:00, when the sluggish mortal synapses have to turn over and over: ok, _sure_ , I am right now being followed by 120 lbs. of blonde murder: what a laugh the guys are going to get out of that.

But here she can fling herself from pillar to pillar and from her head whisper the colorful scarf to loop it in a cheerful garrote around one of those sun-baked necks from which rise those sweet pastry breaths of the ripe throat, and when she pulls, it's in full view of the bright spotlights that hover perpetually over those glass-fronted cases, watching, watching.

She doesn't want to sound like a certain thousand-year-old creeper freak here: but it's so nice when they struggle.

You just want to softly pet the hair for a moment, and remember how once it was your curls someone so lovingly stroked; it's gonna' be ok, she heard and she says, but you're never saying it to reassure them: you always want them to know.

Klaus leans against the stair banister as she strangles the man.

He has that proud little half-smile on his face.

When their eyes meet, she is struck by that sudden realization which in the heated moment never penetrates the fog: her panties are wet. She can feel, with that shivery almost-presence of the amputated ghost limb, his back muscles under her nails; she remembers, he likes to be scratched down his spine, and torn up along the shoulders.

When he first pushes inside you, he lets out this little ragged breath through his half-open mouth, his eyes fluttering.

She holds his gaze until the man is dead, and lets the limp body in her arms slide down onto the floor between them.

He doesn't rip off anyone's head: they have to be a bit cleaner than that, he tells her: there are too many humans to compel them all.

"That's rich, Mr. Channel Three Vampire," she says, but she tosses her scarf jauntily over her, like a rifle she is shouldering. She doesn't say: good. She doesn't say: I want it that way.

She doesn't say: when she in one single wrench snaps the neck of a man twice her size, that's so, so satisfying: to wreak that kind of destruction with her small and painted hands.

But the slow kill.

The shuddery press of the struggling body, the thrashing of those slowly failing limbs, the sudden and panicked final spurt, when everything inside the human cries out in yearning: he's too young, she's so pretty, they were just walking merrily along, with the whole world before them.

When he kills, it's practically pornographic.

He presses himself to them from behind; the gun is almost gently taken from their hands, and his smooth cheek pressed to their bearded own. The arms tighten so unexpectedly you never see it coming: but you hear the sudden gurgling, and that odd swaying puppet dance of the unhinged knees, which, oxygen-starved, flail with masterless insecurity.

And then the soft murmuring lips next to your ear, the nose that trails slowly, slowly along your neck, that freaking arm, popeyed with sudden muscle. You can see every tendon standing out in his forearm, and the heaving throat skin sticking to it where sweaty skin meets sweaty skin. There's the slowly caressing hand over the hair, and both murdered and murderer give that long, sensual twitch: the full body flinching of all the juddering nerve endings, singing simultaneously.

She feels her fangs break her gums, but nope, _no_ : she breathes, in through her nose, out through her mouth, and an agonizing millimeter at a time, they retract.

His necklaces jangle when he releases his latest victim; she thinks what they feel like, skin-warmed, against her fingers, and turns away toward the next room, where she can hear someone breathing.

It's a frightened hostage; she nearly kills him before she realizes her mistake.

"Get out," she says, somewhat snappishly, and he obeys with a little soundless gasp he is too scared to let past his lips.

But there are two hunters in the next room, and though Klaus deftly kicks the gun from the hands of the first, he leaves the second to her.

She punches him in the face: you never see that coming.

And then suddenly she's on top of him, her knuckles stinging, the little shards of bone she has splintered prickling through her skin and when she fits her knee into the hollow of his throat and she leans all her weight into it, she feels all of these sensations collide, the bristling pain in her hand, the slippery heaving of his throat against her knee, those scrabbling, scrabbling fingers, which pick, futilely, at her pants, the hand that skids off her thigh and lands on the calf she has tucked underneath her, and oh God, how he digs in, he's trying so _hard_ to hold on, and it's so good, it's so, _so_ freaking good, she can feel her heart in her throat, her wrists, her thighs, it's like all of her is this fluttering, fluttering pulse, and then suddenly he says, "Caroline," right in her ear, and she grabs him by the hair at the nape of his neck, tearing at it, and turns her face to the side.

She doesn't really kiss him.

She just leaves her lips against his, and breathes into him, the man choking underneath her.

She unsnaps her jeans so hard she almost tears off the button, and then she takes one of the big warm hands that's crept onto her hip, and she slips it down into her panties.

He presses his forehead against hers, so hard, like he's trying to imprint himself there.

She shoves her knee down into the man's throat; she can hear his windpipe creak. There's a last burst of frantic scrambling at her knees, her thighs, the backs of her legs; she can just see his red face over the top of that hand.

" _Klaus_ ," she gasps, and slides her other knee down, so that now she's bracketing the guy's throat with either leg, and she squeezes in tight, so for just a moment he has one slight hope of respite, he draws a single long breath, and then he gurgles, he locks both his strong hands around her kneecaps.

Klaus' fingers are just as practiced as she remembers.

And it's been so long, months upon months of extra long showers and those luxuriantly scented baths where you sink down beneath the foam to be submerged in your own private wonderland, and then he shifts behind her and she feels the hard blunt head through his jeans, nudging against her ass, and she comes with this long shuddering breath into his mouth, shaking all through the man's final death throes.

* * *

He usually wakes up with one of Tim's arms tossed over him, and the drooling face pressed to the back of his neck. Quite the charmer, our darling Irishman.

But he flops over into the cool smoothness of a bed which has been vacated for some hours, and opens his eyes to find himself tangled alone in the one sheet they have left on the bed; the rest of the covers are crumpled somewhere on the floor.

He is, at it turns out, sunning on the terrace, in one of the loungers, with his hat low over his eyes, one leg pulled up so that his arm can be picturesquely draped over it. His shirt sleeves are turned back so the nearly blonde hairs on his arms are gilded: the morning sun touches them with strategic brilliance, so he is some half Midas creature of Ovid's frothiest verses, the head in shadow, the legs brightly blanketed.

"What's the matter with you?" he asks, and kicks at one of Tim's boots, putting his hands in his pockets.

The hat is adjusted so he can see the half-open blue eyes.

"Nothing," he replies, and begins to fiddle with the watch in his pocket. If all of history has ever birthed a worst liar, he doesn't know of them.

He sits down in the chair across from Tim, propping his feet on the lounge. The sun is nice; he sees why the humans fry themselves in it. There's something reassuring in the sunlight; it throws no strange shadows that under the moon's warlock fingers transform the most ordinary of items into the threateningly fantastical.

And it picks out the green in his eyes.

"Did you have another nightmare?" he asks, and Tim looks at him from underneath his hat. Of course, of course: men aren't supposed to talk about that sort of thing, and dashing Celtic terrorists all the less. He leans his head back against the chair with a sigh. "I'm not an idiot, darling. I do notice things occasionally." He bumps his knee against Tim's. "What are you dreaming about?"

It's Nik, of course; before what else does a monster himself cower?

But Tim will never admit that to him.

The blue eyes are fully open beneath the hat now, but he doesn't say anything; he just sort of works his jaw round and fiddles with the pocket watch some more; very manly.

"It's nothing to do with any dreams; I'm just out here thinking." The pocket watch is opened and clicked shut with that thoughtful sort of speed in which men's fingers linger over the most mundane acts.

"You do look particularly broody. We'll produce an off-Broadway hit of our adventures; you could play that Steven Salvatore."

"Stefan," Tim corrects, and shifts a little on his chair. "He was in New Orleans for a bit. He's a fucking twat."

"Nik always had terrible taste in friends." He props his chin on his hand. "What are you thinking about?"

"Yourself, of course. It's all that's ever in me head." He smiles and shoves back against the knee pressed to his own. They leave their legs against one another should they need to flirt further; Tim's face is noticeably brighter beneath his hat.

You could sun yourself in his love.

He clasps the knee in his hand and runs his thumb over it, studying the lie of the trouser threads, smoothing them with one pass and ruffling at the next, feeling the sturdy bone of the kneecap, how a touch here or there will startle the entire leg, and jerk from Tim's lips whatever creative epithet he keeps in ready store: "You shitehawk! Would you ever fuck off," he laughs, and twists away from the wandering fingers.

The hat is knocked back out of his eyes, and he leans forward, the pack of cigarettes suddenly in his hand, one already between his lips. He lights it and takes a long drag, then passes it across the space between their chairs.

For a moment they smoke quietly, sharing the cigarette back and forth, kissing occasionally between inhalations, Tim's hand on his thigh while the other accepts here and there the little stub of paper and then hands it back, their fingers lingering against one another.

"Where do you want to go next?" he asks, pausing for a moment to look down at the cigarette shedding its ash onto the balcony.

"Hmm?" Tim asks, glancing up from where he has now threaded his hands together and is dangling them between his knees.

"After this place. Where do you want to go?"

"I dunno. Do you mean in Egypt, so?"

"Anywhere."

"Em." He puts on his exaggerated Thinking Face, pursing his lips; the eyebrows draw together with overstated seriousness. He wants to kiss the little crinkle between them; it's terribly annoying. Just ruins his reputation. Kol Mikaelson: murderer of babies, ardent kisser of men's eyebrows. "I suppose it's time for us to join ISIS, yeah?"

"I always did enjoy a good beheading. I was thinking maybe somewhere in the Caribbean, though. We could have a good lie in every morning, then spend the rest of the afternoon being utterly unproductive on the beach. Sit round our cabana drinking colored alcohol. Skinnydip. In fact, why ever put on our clothes?"

Tim sits back, laughing. "You're just going to lie about on a beach drinking some kind of strawberry rum slush? Sit round in a hammock stripped to your underwear and catch up on your reading?"

"I can do that for a little while. And we can choose somewhere touristy for when I get bored. Maybe we can fold an American up into a suitcase and leave it on the beach somewhere; that always shakes them up." He clicks his fingers, flicks aside the finished cigarette. "We could be one of those serial killer couples. The first gay one."

"This is _exactly_ what the LGBT movement has been fighting for," Tim agrees.

"All we want is the impunity to murder straight people who wear socks with their sandals."

"That's just terrible. What mad fuck invented that, anyway?"

"The Canadians, I think."

Tim laughs again and leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees, chin in his hands; the pink mirth slowly vanishes from his cheeks, and the eyes contemplate him seriously now; the brow is crinkled distractingly once more. "You all right, lad?"

"You're the one out here brooding like that Salvatore ponce." He picks up one of Tim's hands and tries to hold it as casually as he can, without caressing the lopsided knuckles or anything embarrassing like that.

He does raise the thumb to his mouth and rest his lips against it; Tim is, of course, not nearly so conscious of his status, and kisses him so tenderly a mortal heart, still squishy with unfraught youth, could never stand it.

You can't look directly at that sort of love; you grind it out of children for a reason. The world is never going to return that kind of ardor: you see, you were supposed to grow thorns.

He rests his forehead against Tim's, sighing against the hand he hasn't yet managed to let go of. "You're an idiot."

"Feck off. You're a bigger idiot."

He laughs into the hand still pressed to his mouth.

Tim grabs him suddenly by the collar and hauls him off his chair; his knees bump the edge of the lounger Tim sinks back onto, and then he falls forward, sprawling on top of him. Tim's arms tighten round his back, and he bumps their noses together, smiling. "You know, I've never been to the Caribbean before." He kisses him less tenderly this time, smashing their mouths together so there is that tantalizing hint of teeth behind the rough mouths.

"So I'd be the first to fuck you on the beach?" he asks somewhat breathlessly.

"Ah, no. I tried that. It's terrible; sand all up your arsecrack. It's like dry humping a cactus. Everything chafes and you cry a little bit on the inside." Tim tries to kiss him again; he's laughing so hard he has to dodge the eager lips and for a moment lay his cheek against Tim's, trembling against him.

"When was the last time you dry humped a cactus, darling?"

"Sure you can show me poor old eyes any cracked internet porn the humans can think up and insist we try it so you've a good poker table story, but I can't have me fetishes."

"You sound so offended I'm not sure I shouldn't believe you." He dodges the lips once more; Tim grabs him by the ass and grinds him down a little, which is a sound plan, A+, darling, excellent problem-solving skills.

He lets Tim suck skillfully at his lower lip; it sends a jolt right to his stomach.

"St. Lucia," Tim breathes, a little foggy-eyed. The hands on his ass slide up over the waistband of his jeans, beneath his shirt so he can feel how the callused fingertips tease a long shiver right down his spine. "I saw some pictures of it once. It's nice. Or Anguilla. We can stay in a cabana right on the beach. You can fuck me on every piece of furniture in it."

He licks Tim's neck; just the point of his tongue, just barely touching, and the callused fingers slip beneath his boxers to get a handful of him completely bare. "How do you want me to fuck you?"

"In the ass?" It's rather innocently said, for a 123-year-old man who has some particularly hair-raising stories about the homosexual community of 1920s London.

"Be specific. Position and the like."

The cheeks are instantly pink, and this flame spreads up into the ears, helpfully shaded by his hat. "Ah, come on, then. Sure you know I'm no good at this."

"It's not hard, Tim. Pun intended. Just say what you want. And use pornographic words."

"I want you to slip your hot hard…rattler into me…paradise portal." He finds this clever, and leans his head back against the chair to laugh, pulling his hat over his face.

"I don't understand why I never ate you, darling."

The hat is withdrawn once more, and tossed from the ruffled hair with an exaggeratedly ceremonial flick of the wrist, so that it arcs back toward the bedroom, landing at the base of the sliding glass door. For a moment you can tell by his face that he is about to answer blithely, there is on the tip of his tongue a comment about his gag reflex or hand job technique, and then a sudden gravity overcomes him while they are staring at one another, and he says instead, "Because you waited too long, eejit."

Love is not supposed to feel like an illness: that's a byproduct of Nik's centurial teachings.

So he swallows the bile in his throat, and ignores the twisting in his belly.

It's such a long unraveling, everything he has learned.

They kiss lazily for a long time, indolent with the heat, and when he unbuttons Tim's shirt he does it slowly, touching with his lips the hair at the base of his belly button, and with his tongue following this trail just a little lower.

He pulls both their trousers down just enough to expose their cocks, and for a while the same languid speed is maintained, one of Tim's hands softly trailing up and down his back, just barely skimming, their hips slowly thrusting, the soft skin sliding deliciously, his teeth gently testing and then pulling at Tim's nipples, the softly trailing hand suddenly reaching down to grip his ass when he does this, and the hips pushing with sudden desperation into his own, so he does it again, dropping the fangs this time, and with each pass trailing the points of them over the hard nipples-

The door to their room opens.

He hears Enzo call out, "All right, gentlemen, trousers on," and then the dark head pokes through the sliding glass door, utterly nonplussed by the scene before him. "I'm going to assume you haven't seen the news."

Tim has to take several deep breaths before replying; his cock twitches but does not spurt. "What do you mean?"

"There's a hostage situation at the Egyptian Museum, where you might remember a certain bossy blonde of ours likes to spend her Tuesday afternoons. We can't very well leave her to kill everyone herself, can we?"

* * *

Klaus doesn't slip his hand from her panties until she's completely soaked with sweat, and just boneless against him.

"Sounds like the cavalry is here, love," he whispers right into her ear, and foggily, she discerns him buttoning her jeans. "Give my regards to my brother. And tell him to not make too big of a mess."

* * *

Old soldiers are so boring.

Tim and Enzo are discussing entry points; there is much gesturing and stroking of the chins. He is quite certain the sun itself nods off; a nearby tourist, quite bendy-looking, perhaps twenty or so, dies of old age.

He actually sprouts an age spot on his hand, and on Tim's forehead there is the beginning crease of impending middle age.

Enzo's hair whitens.

"Why don't you draw up a map, darlings," he says, and kicks open the door.

He comes to perhaps a minute or so later, with Tim squatting over him, hands clasped between his knees.

"What happened?"

"You blew yourself up, arsehole. Maybe next time you'll listen to me when I'm talking about modern siege techniques? Or when I say we're going to need to go in through the fucking roof?"

"I doubt it."

Tim rubs his chin a bit dramatically; he appears to be torn between smugness and irritation, but he does hoist him to his feet and knock the cinders from his back.

The museum is worse for wear; the lower level has been liberally chewed by something automatic, and several of the displays have emptied their contents onto the floor; Enzo is standing by an unraveled mummy, poking it with his boot.

He checks himself in an intact glass case; a bit ruffled; handsome, of course; one of his eyebrows is still growing back. His clothes are themselves a bit worse for wear, but all the better for hostage and taker alike: the better to see what that grueling Viking childhood whittled into his waist.

There is a crack from above them; they all look up a level to see a man reel against the staircase, and the little blonde blur which comes flying after him as the banister parts with a groan and man and blur plummet, the man landing with a terrific splatter that dramatically paints the nearest half of Enzo's face.

Caroline looks up from where she crouches on the man's chest.

Enzo takes a generous finger full of the blood on his cheek and slips it into his mouth.

"What are you guys doing here?"

"Something something white knight. I don't understand it all. Tim can probably explain it better; he looked up the definition of chivalry once in the dictionary."

"You guys came to rescue me? That's so sweet!" She stands up, beaming at them.

The man's ribs loudly crack beneath her feet.

"Where's your scarf, gorgeous?"

"Oh, I took it off to strangle some guy." She hops off the man with a little clap. "Ok, so, there are probably about six of them left. Maybe seven; they're hunters, so be careful. So, you and you," she points at himself and Tim, "can make sure the downstairs area is all clear; there are several rooms. And Enzo, I'm going back up to the third level where I'm pretty sure a few of them are hiding out with the hostages, so why don't you come-" She abruptly shuts her mouth when he snaps off the leg of a statue and swings it experimentally. "Hey! You can't just go around breaking this stuff! It's like a million years old, and it's been through enough today."

"An artist needs his tools, darling," he says, and nods at Tim, who takes out his revolver.

There are two in the room off to their right, just waiting for their moment.

He shoves the statue leg through the mouth of the first man; it punches wetly out the back of his skull; a few of his teeth tinkle musically against the floor. Tim breaks the arm of the second when he lifts his rifle to shoot; he fires his revolver point-blank, disintegrating the man's nose. It quite improves his face.

Caroline is nattering something at them.

"Not now, darling," he says; he can smell a third on the floor above them.

The staircase is cleared easily enough; he hardly has to jump. Humans are such lazy architects. Give him a challenge, darlings.

They rampage through the upstairs; Caroline and Enzo are left to entertain themselves with the corpses. Judge not his ungenerous heart, though: he tosses the wooden leg to Tim once he has finished with a victim, and then through another neck it goes with that delicious squelch of yielding flesh (the pistol is too lackluster, and put away after the first shot: a slaughter like this wants a more personal touch). He decapitates one with a single blow; Tim guts another; and by the final they are so worked up that the leg, in splinters anyway, is tossed aside and the teeth frenziedly applied.

The man's neck is in ribbons when he is at last let loose to slither onto the floor, and then they turn on one another.

He shoves Tim into the wall and rips his neatly tucked shirt out of his trousers.

Tim grasps his head in both hands and swings him round so their positions are reversed, the plaster denting under his shoulder; he feels the button on his tattered jeans torn away.

He comes in just a few strokes, right on Tim's face when he kneels before him and takes his cock in hand, pumping it without finesse, the quick and shivery jerks of a man who is himself one wrong hip shift away from his own orgasm, and then the warm lips slide over the head of his cock and down onto the shaft and he feels the tight throat envelope him completely.

He throat fucks him brutally.

Tim does not even pull back to lick at the head or graze a thumb along the underside: he just kneels here before him breathing heavily through his nose, scratching along his legs and up onto his ass with shaking fingers, flexing and then easing off with that warm throat until they are both moaning and he is perhaps another few thrusts from coming again.

And then suddenly Tim pinches the base of his cock with his thumb and forefinger, and pulls his mouth away. His shoulders are heaving; his hat has fallen off; his hair is absolutely wild. "Don't come yet," he says shakily. "Fuck me."

He has to drop his head back against the wall and breathe for several long moments as the fingers begin to lightly stroke him. "We don't have any lube."

Tim spits into his hand and jerks his wet palm roughly up and down his throbbing cock. "I don't care. I don't care," he gasps. "Make it hurt."

He slams Tim down onto a nearby display.

The glass cracks.

They fuck so violently Tim can't even swear when he comes, he just hyperventilates as he shoots, his hand breaking off a piece of the case where he bears down on it, one of the shards splitting his palm.

He licks Tim's hand.

He comes so hard his knees collapse, and he pitches forward onto Tim's sweaty back.

They lie there for a moment just breathing, until at last Tim says, "Listen, me love, you're squashing me bits against the case" and he has to slip himself out anyway, he is laughing so hard.

When they have redressed and set one another's hair to rights once more, Caroline is just coming up the stairs. "What the _hell_. Do you know how careful me and…myself were to make sure that this didn't look like some kind of violent vampire revenge orgy? There's a guy back there with his neck completely ripped up! It looks like some kind of rabid animal attacked him. How the hell are we supposed to pass that off as some human defending themselves? You guys are so _freaking_ \- wait, did you two just have sex?"

"Don't judge, darling." He slings his arm across Tim's shoulders. "It's a beautiful moment between two people who care very much about each other. I came on Tim's face. He's dirty and he likes it that way."

"If you could just put your penises away for two freaking seconds, I swear to God," she starts as he lets Tim precede him back down the stairs, and then right into her ear he says, "Like my brother's?"

She freezes.

"I bet you put that away quite nicely, darling." He runs his nose down her neck to the curve of her collarbone. "Do you think I can't smell his cologne on you?" he asks, and pats her with a menacing sort of friendliness on the cheek.

He skips on ahead of her down the stairs.

* * *

She is jittery all evening.

She and Rebekah snip at one another during their nightly movie, and then forty five minutes into Love, Actually, the Original Bitch stomps off in a huff.

So she does her best broody Stefan impression on the balcony, sitting with an unread book in her lap, watching the sun melt; it splatters all over the buildings. The sky is putting out heat like an oven: one last summery gasp.

She's going to spend the winter somewhere cold: Russia, maybe. She wants to feel life in all its intrusive extremes. You can't be forever seventeen and lie here sunning yourself under an Egyptian sun and not crave its foe: you're going to see revolutions. New Warsaws and old civil wars, playacted a thousand thousand times.

The moon is just new, frail, when she gives up on pretending like she's actually concentrating on her book and goes into her room.

She doesn't want to pretend to psychic tendencies: vampire instincts aren't that good.

But she can sense him.

He probably intends her to.

He probably wants her to lie here sweating in her anticipation, on the one billowy sheet that is all she can stand to be pulled over her while she is sleeping. He probably wants her to sit here twiddling her thumbs and listening to the unnecessary heartbeat in her neck. It must feel so good; it must inflame him like the sick weirdo he is.

She takes a breath.

She flips her book back open.

But there's always the thread in the back of your mind, and you keep pulling, pulling, worrying the strands of it between your fingers, marveling at the texture. There is no gifted enough a pen to submerge her in distant worlds that she'll need to be jolted from upon his arrival. Banffy's diaphanous mists and cherries like polished diamonds are just ink; he could have poured all of himself into them; he could have emptied the entirety of his life onto these pages, a piece of his soul for a moment of her time, and still what she touches with her fingers and lingers over with her heart is not the rush of Balint's poor enamored blood and the heavy settling of his buffalo milk breakfastes.

He doesn't knock.

They both know she is aware of him standing out there on the balcony.

She can see him without seeing him: the hands are tidily clasped. He'll have his curls neatly disordered. The moon will be like fresh milk on the thin strands of his necklaces.

When she walked into his family's ballroom wearing his dress, she thought: ok. She's got this. She was so polished, from head to toe; he's seen endless princesses and innumerable countesses and tsarinas who seem to grow the jewels themselves, they sprout that many of them from their soft white limbs.

But, dammit, they're no Caroline Forbes in full Miss Mystic mode.

She thought that.

She thought: so what. He's a billion.

He wasn't going to throw her.

He wasn't going to slide himself into the cracks she forgot to spackle. She armed herself against his dimples and ten gajillion years of game; you can't trust any man that old. He's parted so many knees before yours with just his sly tongue.

But have you ever had…have you ever had someone look at you and just stop?

Like a thousand years and finally, _finally_ he was seeing something for the first time. He looked on something and it wasn't gray with monotony; it was not one more film strip flickering past his nonchalant projectionist's eyes.

And for so long you just wanted someone to look at you, no matter how they did it. And then here was…this whole new way of gazing. Maybe you remember it from when you were a child, when you touched the world with such yearning, questing fingers. Nothing had yet gathered dust. There were twelve shades in one autumn leaf: you counted them all. A frosty shoot crumbled like cake in your fingers because you never could have foreseen: it's that easy to kill. It's that easy to die.

So, see, she never had a chance.

Maybe they have that in common.

She opens the sliding glass door slowly.

She's barefoot, so for once she can't look him eye to eye.

He leans down.

You'd think, so long, so long: this is gonna' be a kiss for the storybooks.

But he just rests his forehead against hers.

The thing you have to understand is, she's not sorry. She will be, later.

She's always going to be sorry, sometimes. It's never going to be seamless, loving him. Mikael or immortality: something broke all the integral parts of him that made his family crawl after him for ten centuries of moody murders and he thought they were better left in pieces, and he stomped them a little more. You can't fix that. You can't glue dust back together; you can break all the integral parts of yourself trying. You can do that.

But she thinks: probably somewhere there was a part he missed.

She tilts her head up.

She does kiss him this time: not the breathy leaning of her mouth on his from the museum. So he knows: ok, it's her, it's him. She didn't go back on that. For a while the conscious part of her doubted it, and wanted to recall it: but a human always keeps secrets from itself, and a monster is no different.

He touches her hair.

If she had anything left to yield, this would do it.

And there's this sudden freaky rush inside both of them, this simultaneous propulsion, and then they are tearing at one another, trying to figure out, how do you make the space smaller, how do you sloppily kiss all the mundane parts, the nose, the eyebrows, so they understand: you're never going to be able to touch enough.

She falls through the sliding glass door, pulling him with her.

He breathes like a dying man through his nose; he kisses all over her face because you can't pull away, not in a moment like this, not even though there are miles of legs to explore, and the soft white belly skin, and those sensitive arcs of the breasts, hypercharged with nerves.

She throws him on the bed.

It takes too long to remove his shirt; she tears it down the middle and presses herself to him.

He rips off her jeans.

When they're naked, he doesn't even enter her; he holds her so tightly against him, kissing her hair, his hands clutching at her back; she can feel his nails pressing into her skin, drawing blood. He's still all virile anti-Christ: she can feel that hard blunt head pressing into her thigh, already slick, but he's not concerned with that, not right now.

He goes over every inch of her like he never knew it in the first place; he kisses new flesh and smoothes the unfamiliar hair from her face, leaving one warm hand on her hip so that he's never not in contact with her.

She pulls at his hair and she scratches his back and she gasps his name in the porniest way possible, but he trails all the way to her ankles, which he doesn't so much kiss as just lean into, still breathing his last.

If loneliness were a man, and he loved the only way you could expect him to: without finesse, without understanding, without hope.

She finally tugs him back to her by his necklaces, and they end up in this sprawl against the pillows, her back half-propped on the backboard, her legs wrapped around his waist, so that when he finally slips into her, she's in his lap, they're face to face, she can see every little change in his face.

He stops breathing when the tip of him slides in, and starts again when she pushes herself forward to meet his hips.

He's like this little overawed virgin, she thinks, and smiling, kisses his sweaty nose.

He tries to keep his eyes open, but when she pulls back and then slowly thrusts forward again, his head drops back and the adam's apple bobs frantically up and down, once, twice, and it takes her only a couple of thrusts like this for her to come, his cock so warm, so slippery, God, she is just _coating_ him, but it's only a little beginning ripple that pulls a brief gasp from her, it's a sort-of warm-up, so when he leans forward to press his forehead against hers and the tip of him angles just right to hit her g-spot with a juddery little shock, she isn't over-stimulated, she keeps slowly rolling her hips, clutching at his shoulder, kissing the indent between neck and shoulder where he's softest and smells best-

The second one takes her by surprise: she knows she's right there, but still the strength of it tightens her arms so that he's crushed against her breasts and she breathes, "Oh God, oh God, oh _God_ " into his ear, swiveling her hips, grinding them into him now while he just freaking loses it and begins to pound into her.

She can tell when he has to let go of her and grab the bedboard against her back that he's about to come; his hands tighten audibly; the wood cracks in his fingers. There's a plume of dust when he drops his head back and groans with this sort of wild abandon that sends this little white hum through her, so that she feels it in her clit. There's this long, hot spurt, and that turns her on too, she has to grab at the nape of his neck and bite his throat and slide her hand down to roughly rub herself, her g-spot orgasm still twitching in her legs when another warm throbbing in her clit suddenly drops her fangs right into his soft, soft throat.

He cries out.

He doesn't do that very often: he usually comes quietly, breathing a little harder, his eyelashes trembling.

He kisses her neck, hard, smashing his face into it, holding her around the back with his arms, his hands splaying out, his chest heaving against hers. He's completely wrecked; his hair shoots out in all directions. She's bitten his lips, she notices suddenly, foggily: they're red, swollen, a little bloody. He looks completely unraveled: not like some thousand-year-old bisexual Casanova at all. He has to lean against her, pressing his face between her collarbones.

The breeze is blowing in through the door she forgot to close; she blinks, realizes she can once more hear the traffic over the sounds of their breathing.

Klaus won't let go of her.

This stupid, stupid jerk.

She pets the hair on his neck; there's a little piece that curls up at the end. She can feel him softening a little inside of her, but they don't separate: he couldn't stand that. She'll peel him off her later, when she stops remembering how she forgot what he feels like.

His stomach grazes gently against hers when he breathes, and for a long time she just sits there, stroking the hair at his nape, her head on his shoulder, the swollen lips nestled against her temple.

* * *

Kol eyes her with his head tipped to one side at their next weekly poker match, which she just last Thursday implemented, because these boys are _sharks_ , and fleecing, like, mobsters out of their gold Rolex whatever actually kind of sounds like fun.

She does have to argue with Kol for like five freaking hours before he reluctantly agrees that no one has to take off any clothes when they lose a hand, though, and even then, Tim has to talk him back into his pants (probably a confusing new experience for him) at least twice. Sure, so, beating of me heart like, the lass can't handle it, he says, or something like that, with the most smoothly excellent execution of sarcasm she has ever witnessed. It almost skims even Kol's head; he pretends it does, and smirks at her.

She rolls her eyes when he darts out his tongue and makes these particularly porny gestures with it.

"Are you going to go, or just make me watch your O face for the next three hours?"

"Patience, darling; I'm telling a story." He glances down at his cards and strokes his chin. "So Tim is fucking me, and she's lying right on the bed next to us, and she just snaps right up off the coverlet all of a sudden, and she says, "Wait…are you gay?"

"This is a really gross story. And don't you have, like, any consideration for your boyfriend's delicate constitution? He's clearly embarrassed."

Kol blinks. "I don't understand the question."

Tim punches him in the leg; too uncomfortably close to his junk, apparently, because Kol jerks suddenly to one side at vampire speed. "Would you feck yourself twice into the sun?" Tim asks, and taps his cards. "Call."

"I'll fuck anything you want me to, darling, if you'll return the favor."

Enzo goes on squinting at his cards, ignoring everything else but the plate of ta'meya in front of him, to which he is lovingly devoted. She earlier tried hinting to him that Rebekah was alone in her room, trying on her latest shopping trip, which she was made -by the amused gymnastics of his right eyebrow, which moved with impressive autonomy beside his impervious left- to understand wasn't very subtly handled, but whatever. The course of psychopathic murder love never did run smooth. Shakespeare said that.

They've taken over one of the club's back rooms -not the sex one- which was formerly occupied by a group of half a dozen or so vampires who immediately vacated with their compliments upon sight of their little quartet; apparently they've got some kind of reputation. She's going to have to test it out the next time she really, really needs to pee. Through the walls there is the thumping of some kind of electronic hip hop mishmash which Tim has named Overture: Cat vs. Blender in C Minor, but here they are enfolded in their own private soundtrack which trails from the phone beside Tim's hand and is joined by that effervescent hissing of the hookah smoke, which she has allowed: the little white puffs are inoffensive; they smell a little like apples in their full autumn maturity.

Outside the window she can hear the entire living mass of Cairo, steaming from every pore. The sun fries the tourists like eggs; you can almost hear the whitest of them sizzling.

They have worked their way through half a dozen rounds; she is completely demolished, of course, but she's picked up several important tips, first and foremost being that if your boyfriend is a 'lousy fecking cheater', stabbing him in the hand is an acceptable and even affectionate way to air your displeasure.

"How do you have such a good poker face?" she whines to Tim. "You're a terrible liar."

"Because I taught him, darling. I was tired of Marcel; I tried losing to him in several inventive ways and still he couldn't beat me. Nik stopped playing me centuries ago; Bekah was never much interested in cards, and Elijah considers it beneath him to cheat, which is the only way he can beat me." Kol takes a long swig from the vodka bottle he and Tim are sharing back and forth.

"What are we listening to?" she asks, nodding toward the phone.

"Schubert's Winterreise cycle," Tim tells her distractedly, cocking his head at his cards. You can see all the little gears whirring and clicking inside his head: he'll need every single well-oiled one of them to defeat the lying, million-year-old jackass at his elbow. Or weird sex bribes. But where do you go after butt sex, reluctant fall-back of wily girlfriends everywhere?

"It's nice. It kind of makes everything feel more epic. Like whoever loses is going to die or something."

"We can arrange that," Kol says; his hand disappears under the table. In these quiet moments of distracted eyebrow furrowing and Enzo's chewing is when he'll try for something gross like a stealthy hand job, but she thinks this time they're actually just holding hands under the table, like big murderous dorks she really just cannot deal with sometimes.

Tim flicks his eyes over at Kol for just a moment, and smiles a little; definitely holding hands.

"Ok, so, I have a question. What do you guys do when you want to talk the other person into something? You know how when you're in a couple and sometimes you fall back on sex to persuade the other person to do something you don't want to? Like take out the trash or wash the dishes or whatever?"

"Easy," Kol says. "Neither of us does the dishes. We compel someone to do them for us."

"Well, that was just an example. Say you want to kill someone and Tim doesn't, but you really want him to join in. Or you want to go to, like, New Zealand, and Tim wants to travel through Iceland or whatever. You can't just say, hey, if you'll join me on this next flight to Auckland, I'll let you put it in my butt."

Tim chokes a little on his vodka.

"Why would we bribe each other with sex acts? Have you seen us, darling? Neither of us gives it up reluctantly or needs to be taunted along with some sort of metaphorical carrot on a stick."

"I'm just wondering. Where do you go after a million years of weird sex acts?"

"Orgies."

"I thought you were minding me 'delicate constitution'," Tim points out, swirling the remaining vodka in its bottle and aggressively knocking it back. He is approximately the same shade as the lipstick she slicked on this morning.

Klaus likes red on her.

"Well, maybe you should stop being such a prude all the time."

"She only disapproves if _I_ make you feel uncomfortable, darling."

"You guys don't, like, do it with animals or anything, do you?"

"Tim did once. With a sheep."

"I did not! Would you stop saying that! Me hand to God, I never boffed a sheep." He says it so seriously she can't not burst out laughing.

"How many people _can_ you have in an orgy? I mean, realistically. Eventually you have to run out of…holes."

"Only your imagination limits you, Caroline," Kol assures her, taking his hand out from beneath the table and replacing it on his cards. Tim is concentrating so hard on his poker hand that she is 200% positive he has had some really weird sex that is still agitating his tortured Catholic soul.

"Ok, what's the most number of people you've been with at the same time?" she asks.

"You mean, in the same hole, so?" Tim responds.

"Uh…no, I meant, like, total number of participants. How many people can you put in the same hole?!"

"Oh, sweet Caroline," Kol says.

"Three," Enzo says.

" _What_?" she screeches. "How would _you_ know?" She has completely forgotten her cards; they scatter across the table.

"It's like phone booth stacking for penises," Kol adds.

"I hear the record's seven," Tim tells her, and his face does that little aborted twitch that means he's trying not to laugh.

"You mean you set the record, darling."

"Now you guys are just screwing with me."

"My hand to God," Tim promises, like proper grammar is supposed to persuade her that he is For Real Completely Sincere this time.

"You know, I asked an actual serious question, and you jerks are just making fun of me. Thanks a lot."

"Go poke round the internet," Tim tells her. "Everything you never wanted to know."

"Yeah, last time that happened Kol and I ended up watching this Chinese porn where the guy did push-ups with his penis. And wrote calligraphy with it." It was really kind of impressive, but Kol laughed till he cried and then wiped his face on her shirt, and there was, like, left-over person ground into his stubble or something, because there's this stain she still hasn't managed to scrub out of the sleeve and he didn't even try and make the teensiest half-assed attempt at Sorryface over the whole debacle. Plus, he ate all her licorice.

So this is what she does: she plays poker. She lets the boys talk her into scaring the tourists; she gets Rebekah to smile, sometimes.

And she makes her sly excuses and she walks off alone to a certain street corner where there so happens to lurk a blonde and handsome man who steps out of the shadows without a word: he always lets her go first.

She says something like, "Fancy meeting you here", and he smiles and smiles.

You're never particularly picky, when you're in love: not when it's new, or freshly-polished. So they screw in more than a few dark alleyways, and once, surreptitiously, behind the pyramids where she sits on his lap and bunches up her skirt a little and he unzips his jeans without pulling them down and probably someone, far off, is giving them the are-they-really squint, and she feels this little frisson wondering about this far-off someone who can see just that little seesaw of motion, enough to deduce.

She meets him in hotels when she can; he spends hours licking and touching everything and for so long withholding her orgasm that hours later she manages one long in-drawn breath and can't even scream when it hits her at last.

* * *

Caroline is fucking Klaus again; you can tell by the look on her face, and the one on Kol's.

"Ok, I'm off for a shopping trip with Rebekah," she tells them after one weekly poker match in which he has finally soundly trounced Kol, the bastard, and when she stands, so too does himself. He has some vague excuse, and leaves before her. He can't hear any whisper of his brother; you can see how he grimaces just saying the name, the knife edge of it. He'll be bright and over-smiley afterward: sure he's grand and such. Witty as any man too sad to cry.

He and Enzo look at one another.

He stubs out the celebratory cigarette Caroline allowed him.

They converge on her, one on either side, and up go the arms round the narrow little shoulders.

"The pair of you are always shopping. Let's find something else to do," he says. Enzo gives her the smirk.

Caroline laughs. "Yeah, right, boys. Rebekah will kill me if I don't show up."

Enzo slips her phone out of her handbag. "Hello, gorgeous #2," Enzo says into it, the silky bastard. "We were wondering if we could steal Caroline from your shopping trip."

"What? We're not going on any shopping trip."

"Thanks, love. That settles it," Enzo replies, and hangs up. "She's forgotten about you already, Gorgeous. You're ours for the day."

"Oh, that's ok. If she doesn't want to go, I think I'll just go back to my room and take a nice bath or something. Maybe read for a while. I just kind of feel like relaxing."

"We absolutely refuse," Enzo says, and they whisk her over to the bar, where Drunk Caroline's prodigious appearance will take a nice steaming shite all over a cracked idea like that: bubbles and Brontë at scarcely 18:00, she bloody thinks not.

You're after wanting a leash when she's soused, though.

Sprint right out into the middle of traffic and give yourself three minor cardiac events, she will, and then bend over onto her knees wheezing with laughter when your gallant arse is struck by a car, trying to warn her there's a fucking lorry bearing down on her.

"Let's play Frogger!" she screams in his ear.

"No," he says, and grabs her by the elbow. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the Bible told him he was going to pay for all the sodomy, so.

"Yes," Enzo, says, and pries his hand from her elbow. "Go on, gorgeous. We'll meet you on the other side. Come on, Tim. Where's your sense of adventure, mate?"

"Broken in half, like me fucking tibia," he says, and then, " _Shit_ ," because she's after weaving her way out into the center of the motorway, giggling, and sure her beau must be lurking somewhere giving him the murder eyes, permanent or no, you don't scuff a one of the gleaming curls that he doesn't scent wind of it and pull the lungs right out of your arsehole-

"Caroline!" he yells after her.

"Timothy!" she yells back, making a little scrunchy face at him, and stepping right into the path of a taxi.

The driver shotguns his brakes.

She wanders off, giggling.

They shut down traffic on the motorway for a good twenty minutes; no one seems to know what to do: the white lady sitting on the pavement looks like a tourist, and you don't scatter their fat wallets to the four winds, no, so you ought to try and lure her into your taxi, here, so, nice American, eight LE to Tahrir Square where they've lovely coffee houses with chairs and everything.

Twenty minutes is the boundary for his rather elastic chivalry; he picks her up over his shoulder.

"Hey!" she yells; he plugs the ear nearest her. They ought to have dropped that voice on Hiroshima.

"We're not sitting in the middle of the fecking motorway."

"Yes, we are."

"No, we're not." He whistles to Enzo, who is chatting up a car full of leggy Aussie lasses.

"You're not drunk enough," she 'whispers' into his ear, blasting the hearing straight out of him. He staggers dumbly onto the shoulder. Enzo's lips move; he gives them the deaf man's squint.

"Oh my God, I'm not that loud," she shrieks, and hops down from his shoulder, straightening her skirt. "Enzo, let's get him 'pissed'."

"I'm grand, actually," he says.

They stuff him with half a dozen shots of tequila; Enzo tops this with some beer. Caroline gives him six more shots.

"Come on, now," he tries to warn her, swaying. "I'm an angry tequila drunk."

In the interests of science, she tells him, she wants to see this. She's picturing some hand wringing, she tells him. A slightly louder, "excuse me, so"; he might crumple the hat a little in his hand, and flex the smooth baby's jaw.

"Didn't you tell me he once lit some man's face on fire in a bar?" Enzo asks.

"Oh, right. Oops."

They're kicked out of their first bar right quick.

He quarrels with the bartender.

He quarrels with the bouncers.

He quarrels with an old man on the street who steps on Caroline's foot gawking his eejit head off.

Enzo films him on his phone.

Caroline says, "Ok, ok, everyone," and waves her hands about like a traffic conductor. "We're all good. We. Are. Good."

"Text Kol," Enzo says into his phone. "Filming some porn for you, mate. I'll send it to you in a moment."

They're kicked out of their second bar.

They break the door off their third bar when he sprawls out into the street with four men on top of him; he likes that, usually, just not when they're kicking the bejaysus out of him.

"Give them the chair!" Caroline cheers.

"He doesn't have a chair," Enzo points out.

She disappears inside the bar.

He is handily dealing with one lad when she reappears with a stool in her hand.

Sure it's a man's unspoken rule you avoid the other lad's stones when you're lamping him a good one, but not when he's after taking the head off you and feeding it to his linebacker mate who's punching your spine with a fist like a fucking bulldozer shovel.

He kicks the lad's bollocks.

Caroline hands him the stool.

He wallops the fucking shite out of the linebacker; he falls with that great bloody bulldozer shovel over his face.

The other two lads tackle him.

He lands on top of one of them and deals him a punch that cracks the head back against the pavement; the other wants to be gentlemen about this, and starts circling him with his fists up.

He puts him in a headlock.

Enzo's mobile rings.

"Yeah, mate," Enzo answers as he starts to punch the lad in the head. "Yeah. Caroline's put some tequila in him. Did you get my video? Brilliant. We're on…I dunno. Love?" he asks Caroline, who pops back inside the bar.

"El Kabbari?"

"El Kabbari. We're about to take Vampire Terminator here to another club. He's just finishing up. Say hello." Enzo holds the phone up so the sounds of the beating are magnified. "Oh, hold on, mate; I think someone's rung the coppers. Right. See you in a bit." Enzo hangs up.

He drops the lad, who's finished.

"Cut up over a street. We're meeting Kol at a club there," Enzo tells him.

They meet Kol at a club there.

He's already laughing when he walks inside. "Look at you. You're like an angry little street urchin, darling. You've got dirt all over your cheeks." Kol wipes the smudges from them.

"Fuck you," he says.

He quarrels with Kol.

Caroline plies him with several more tequila shots.

He vomits all over his shoes; Kol holds him up out of it when he nearly pitches into this pile of his dignity he has left loudly all over the floor and the slacks of the patron next to him.

"You little fucking arsehole bombay shithawk Jesus fuck would you stop laughing," he tells Kol in between vomiting.

Sure it's not his finest hour.

* * *

They swoop in twice more when Caroline's after waltzing off to go meet Klaus. And Enzo says to him, he says to him, "It's you, mate. I've got something to take care of," both times, and leaves the pair of them blinking in his absence.

He stares into his drink.

She's off and running like talking isn't something to be worked for; she slides into it all butter-like. You can barely spot the seam between her momentary bewilderment -and where is _he_ going- and the conversational rivers she ejects like an Irish springtime: whoops a daisy, lads, there's another of the dams- no defeating an April afternoon, is there?

He's still finding his sea legs with her.

He has a nice conversation with his beer: grand, and ye, how's Mac and the kids; they stare at one another in solidarity. Sure she'll need a breath eventually; she hasn't fallen out of those human habits she's only a few years removed from.

She hits him in the arm.

He jumps.

" _Talk_."

He says something like, "Yes'm." It sounded better in his head; most of his witticisms do.

She's eyeing the tequila all shiftily again, so's he walks her politely out of the bar with his hands in his pockets and points out the stars are grand tonight, aren't they, Alexandria's easier on them than smutty old Cairo, and would you look at that moon, fat with her triumph over the sun.

He doesn't hate the sun. But when it's constant so bearing down on the back of his neck and smoking the paleness out of him he feels the Irishman's unique disorientation: hello, then, and what have we here? Something yellow in the sky, lads.

He does miss the rain. He bitches about it like any good Celt, but he misses the rain. The soft floaty gray wisps of the clouds, jelly fishing over the city and the tourists swimming along beneath it with their moist pneumonia coughs, those whispering pops of the umbrellas a right good gust will be along in a moment to laugh at -oh sweet Yank- the blurry watercolor of the buildings melting toward the Liffey.

He feels a bit more at home in this autumn night, then. He takes her down to the Corniche waterfront and he can feel the spray of the Mediterranean on him there, so that's not so bad, then. There's the fat puff clouds above them and the stars peek booing through and cars still hissing past on the streets and they wander along the promenade without speaking for so long he feels she's after earning some cute little sticker face with the #1 TRIER! on its glinty gold side.

It's grand.

They walk all the way down past Giovanni's and onto Mamura beach where Caroline takes off her shoes and dips her toes into the foam at the edge of the beach. She kicks it at him.

He twists himself away from it, hands still in his pockets and tells her, "You watch it," with this sort of sneaky fondness suddenly crushing the breath in him. He's still not sure what she's poked into the soft parts of him, but Jesus, Mary and Joseph, if he wouldn't take an eejit's head off for smushing one of her wee toes.

They sit next to each other in the sand for a while, though there are some nice loungers with the umbrellas taken down so a random yank from the wind doesn't carry them off into the waves. Caroline says you don't experience a chair; he says you don't get sand in your arse, either.

She thinks that's funny, wants to batter it about on her tongue, feel out the strangeness of it: arse; arrrssse; me arse; you're an arse; arse arse arse, and he says to her, "Look here, Yank."

They lean their shoulders against one another. She makes him put his arm round her so she can rest her head on his chest. He's not really had a lass do that before; he took up with a Russian girl for a while, back in, oh, '43 or so, he'll say; older woman. But it wasn't like this. She called him Teem; they used to fuck in her husband's bed while the poor bastard was off freezing his bollocks in one of the camps. She always kicked him out right afterward, and he'd feel just terrible, thinking about that poor bastard in the camps whose letters she ignored, and he'd go sit at the Horseman's base and brood for a while with his collar turned up.

"You ought to write to him, just once, so," he said to her. "He'd like a little reminder there's an outside world that remembers him."

She laughed at him.

And oh, Mary and Joseph, he got so mad looking at her little red mouth open like that, isn't there a kernel of humanity left in the whole of humankind, he thought, and he never knew what black possessor took hold of him then, but when she pulled him down onto the bed to take her grope of him, he slipped one of the fine lacy pillows over her face and held it there till she stopped twitching.

The husband's name was Vladimir Aleiksovich; Stalin caught him writing letters to a mate that had less than keen things to say about the Soviet government, and slapped him with a tenner.

He wrote letters to the lad in the wife's hand for a whole year, sketched out a nancy older gentleman in his head, 40ish but wine-aged, whittled by his sentence but still dignified, and he fell like a poor dumb mook head over heels into his love, and drowned himself in the Neva when it was all said and done and he took three trains out to the archipelago to bring the man a pair of shite mittens he'd made himself and would be swiped from the bathhouses in twenty minutes tops and discovered he'd been corresponding with a dead man going on four months now.

He never had but a girl here and there after that. They were nice soft untouchable things who giggled their way past him and sometimes twisted him round their fingers and fecked him not like the boys did, but so he understood, afterwards they expected the nice evening park romps and come next spring or two a soft pink miniature of himself in a pretty white pram and he'd just get twisted up about it, so, and think oh maybe, maybe, for a while- but you could be even lonelier, snared in something like that. His ma remarried once when he was fourteen or so; they hated each other in a year. It just wasn't his da; that was a folklore love.

They sit for a while in the moonlight. She's nice and soft, like. He can't bring himself to tighten the hand on her shoulder or kiss the blonde head or anything so forward as that, but he leaves his arm there. You've got too much love in you, his ma used to tell him. People don't like that, Timothy; they'll want to break it. You can't be shoving the softness of their ownselves in their faces like that.

Sure someone must have told her the same thing. You've got to be pickier about it than that; sniff round someone for a while. Give him a bit here and there. He's glad someone had the foresight to turn her; humans are an awful slippery lot. They don't want to be held onto. And, oh, don't tell them: but you're here so briefly.

"Is your mom's birthday coming up?" she asks him finally, still staring out over the ocean.

He looks down at her head. "Did Kol tell you that?"

"No. But you're kind of sad lately. And I remember you talking about how you go back every year and visit your mom on her birthday. So I thought maybe that was coming up or something."

"What do you mean I'm sad lately? It's just me face; all the rain's settled in it."

"I mean sometimes we're all having fun and joking and laughing and it's like you're not really there for a few minutes. It reminds me of how I feel when I think about my mom. You just kind of…clock out. Because nothing's more important than remembering them."

He scratches a little line in the sand with his toe.

One of the braver rollers strolls all the way up to his ankles, bold as your brass bollocks; he gets a bit of foam in his mouth when it strikes. "It's next Wednesday, so I'm off to New Orleans in a few days."

"Are you taking Kol with you?"

"No. It's a private thing. And he just sort of tolerates sentimentality like that, anyway; he doesn't really understand it."

"I think he likes it. I think he'd never in three million years admit it, but he thinks it's kind of cute. Like maybe he can't really understand it, but he likes it because it's you. And I bet he still misses his mom too. So maybe it's not so much that he can't understand it, but he can't imagine a family where you can just go sit by their graveyard and bring flowers and talk about everything they missed and know that somewhere they're happy you're happy or they're sad that you're sad."

"Me ma would think I'm an abomination too, if she met me now."

She lifts her head. She doesn't look at him, but she tilts her head thoughtfully at the sky and processes this for a bit. "I don't think so. I think she'd still recognize her son. I think she'd be really impressed there's still so much of him left after he's spent over a century as a literal monster and he had the worst possible tutor ever to kick it all off."

"Me mother was a good Irish Catholic who only ever fecked two men and once dashed a whole pot of hot tea into me stepda's face for coming home just lousy with whiskey. But you're lovely for that."

She stands up, dusting off her trousers. "This is getting heavy; come on. Let's go skinny dipping."

"No."

"Come _on_ , Tim," she wheedles, and he looks away so he can't see the little fluttery eyes she makes at him, big Me Word Is Command doe stare and the pouting of the tragically crinkled brow. "Your husband will be so irritated you got to see me naked and he didn't."

"I don't want to see you naked," he says, and that didn't come out at all right, did it now, lad, so he fumbles out another try, of course he didn't mean it like that, sure she must be just grand naked, and the sweat boils up under his collar and one of his poor old cheeks just spontaneously combusts, taking the red and humiliated ear with it, and he'll just be drowning himself in the next wave fresh onto the land, so he will.

She's laughing at him, which is no less than he deserves.

"I don't mean I want to see you naked either. I'm not picturing it to meself or anything. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Please take me pistol and shoot me."

She laughs again, and unwinds the scarf from her hair, flinging it toward him.

He catches it and drapes it carefully over one of the lounger arms.

"Ok, fine. I won't pressure you into it. But I don't know what the big deal is; I _know_ you've gone skinny dipping with Enzo and Kol."

"That was different."

"How?" She pulls her shirt over her head; he covers his face with his hands, and the blouse lands on his head.

"I was drunk. And it's different with men. You grow up seeing their little lad swinging round in your face from the time of your first swimming hole trip. I was born in the 1900s; you didn't get casually naked in front of a lass."

"But you're gay."

"So I've noticed."

"So, isn't it a bigger deal to get naked with people you're sexually attracted to? Especially when you had to be Undercover Gay for so long?"

Her trousers nearly knock his block off; he peels them from his face, careful to keep his eyes shut. There's another soft whistling through the air, and he catches the next projectile, and Jaysus those are the lass's unmentionables, all filmy and sin-like in his fingers, there's a froth of lace round the band, and a picture forming in his head, and the good Lord did not die for this; he launches them away from himself. She's cackling like some sort of mad witch.

"Oh, _shit_ , the water is cold!" she shrieks.

He hopes her tits fall off, he thinks with ungentlemanly menace, and then imagines them like any good red-blooded vampire, dedicated to his sodomy or no.

He peeks when he hears her duck under the waves; she surfaces to her collarbones and wipes the hair from her eyes. "Look, I'm being respectful. No boobs above the waterline. Just come in, would you? I won't look, I swear."

"There are people up on the promenade," he protests.

"Oh my _God_ , you are the most selective prude I have ever met in my life. So you will have sex on a freaking stage in front of a large audience and that's fine, but you will not get naked in front of me, one person, or those people up on the sidewalk, complete strangers you will never see again. Cover it with your hat or something if you're really that worried."

"I _wear_ this!"

"It's _your_ dick, Tim. At least you know where it's been. Actually, never mind. That's probably why you don't want it touching your hat." She waves at the people above them, a few of whom have stopped to cluster and point.

"Would you stop that!" he hisses at her. "You can't even show your bloody collarbones here, you think you can run round naked?"

"I'm not running around naked, I'm swimming. What are they going to do, call the cops? Like that would be a new experience for either one of us, Mr. I Drink Two Tequila Shots and Turn Into Vampire Hulk."

"It wasn't two, it was a dozen at least. And I'm not fishing you out of there if the coppers show up. Just come back up onto the beach; there might be hunters still lurking round somewhere. You don't want to be calling attention to yourself." He scratches nervously at the back of his neck and glances up toward their little audience.

She rolls her eyes. "Right. There's going to be a report of a naked woman on the Corniche waterfront promenade, and instead of assuming she's some drunk tourist, they're gonna' be all, 'Vampire sighting, boys! Activate kill mode!'"

One of the men up on the promenade has begun to film her on his phone; he yells, "Hey! Knock off, lad!" and puts on his best FBI's Most Wanted face, which settles him right quick.

Might be the pistol he lets the lad get a peek at helped his cause, but mostly it's the face, he's certain sure.

"Ok, really? Getting naked is a no-go, but threatening people with a gun is fine? Because they'll call the cops on a lady swimming without any clothes on, but nobody's gonna' report that there's a guy on the beach who talks funny and is armed with a revolver?"

"Oh, well, I guess we'll have to leave." He tries to sound somewhat in bits about it.

She rolls her eyes again. "You're really annoying sometimes."

"Only if I like you."

She flutters her eyelashes. "Are you flirting with me?"

He goes all red again; he can feel the heat of it climb up from his collar and make for his cheeks.

"Ok, well, at least toss me my phone."

"Why?"

"I'm gonna' take a selfie so Kol knows I was naked and he wasn't around to see it. Because I'm a jerk. But you know what would make the selfie funnier? If you were in it."

He kicks sand in her general direction, scattering the spray across the waves. "I thought you weren't going to pressure me?"

"I lied. I do that. Now take off your pants."

Mary and Joseph, he regrets ever reconsidering his opinion on this girl.

He tosses her the phone.

" _Don't_ look," he says, and chucks his hat down onto the sand, and after he throws the shirt he unbuttons down to his nipples and yanks over his head. The breeze perks them like a half hour's slobber from the playful tongue; Holy Father preserve him. "I said, don't look!" he yells.

"I'm not!"

"You're staring right at me!"

"Oh my God, _fine_ , I'll turn around," she says, and makes dramatic swooshy motions with her hands, like _he's_ the mad one.

He strips down to his kaks like he's about to get his first chance at cock, flings them down, kicks off the well-loved boots, rockets himself into the waves; he swallows the entire fucking ocean and spits it in her face when he comes up, because sure doesn't she deserve that at least, and she dodges, grabs him by the neck, gives him a sound dunking in the next wave.

"Smile."

"I am."

"That is _not_ a smile. You're not even showing teeth. You look constipated."

"I'm not constipated, I'm freezing me bits off."

"Kay, well pose nicely for the picture and then you can get out." She snaps another shot. "You closed your eyes in this one."

"I did not."

"Really? Then please identify this part of your anatomy for me. You know, the little skin-colored things where your eyes normally are? Do those look like your eyeballs? Is that what your eyeballs look like?"

And then the coppers slide up all silky to the promenade, just whispering into the car park, their sirens off, and he turns to her and he says, "Did I not _fooking_ tell you?" and they both start lashing it out toward the shore, only she's laughing so hard she can barely make it, he has to grab her by an arm and fling her onto the sand and in her general direction just sort of heave the flimsy panties and the sandy blouse as he's scrambling into his trousers and when they yell to him, "Stop!" he grabs her by the arm again and pulls her down along the beach, his boots flapping awkwardly, his shirt in one hand and the suspenders not yet clipped, so he has to hold up his trousers with one hand while he runs, and swear on his mother's grave he hasn't peeked, but it's clear she's still stripped to the waist and they're just gracelessly flopping about while she juggles the poor things into her bra, and then up a staircase and onto the promenade with the both of them and she's wheezing to him, "Your pants are falling down!" and sure he's aware of the situation, thanks a million, and they leg it into the road, where a near miss with a taxi startles the trousers right out of his hand and so he says to himself, ah, fuck it and hurtles right out of the little puddle of them, snatching his gun.

He's still his hat, anyway.

So down the road they sail, Caroline in fits, himself tripping over his boots, and the locals gawking at them from their cars, the coppers screaming along behind them, the sirens going full tilt now, just wailing and wailing, and Caroline yelling into her phone, "San Stefano Grand Plaza, by the Starbucks, we are naked, the cops are after us," and quicker than you can blink some madman comes lurching in from the side to thoroughly upset one of the coppers' day, just bollixing the entire driver's side and then slick as you please reversing all the way to where they have stopped on the sidewalk, clutching their respective unmentionables.

"I was promised nudity," Kol tells them through his open window.

"You'll get it later. Open the door," he says, testing the door with human strength and finding it locked.

"No. I'd like to see how this plays out," Kol replies, and mashes down on the accelerator, fair tearing off his arm.

" _Fuck_ you," he yells, and shoots out two of the tires.

Kol crashes into the Starbucks.

They are arrested with great ceremony.

Caroline is so proud she could cry. "This is my first arrest, you guys!"

"I hate both of you," he says from beneath the largest copper, who has been specially designated to subdue the 6' 3" mostly-naked man. "I lost me pistol."

Kol breaks the cop straddling his back, and holds out the gun he snags from the man's holster as he sags to one side, screaming. "I got you a present."

* * *

Caroline has instructed him to meet her at a little restaurant in Alexandria's Greek Club from where, at an outside table, the whole city is open for review. It's quite a nice night; the moon reposes quietly in the Mediterranean and the boats which pass through it glide with that silken silence of modern technology; there is no angry puffing of the steam to ruin the skyline. In the distance, the library juts proudly into the impervious moon; he listens to the whispers of the chattering humans around him and their mélange of mundane tongues. Such a shame, to take English's soft romance and Arabic's abundant lexicon and the sibilant poetry of German's musical _shhs,_ and apply them to those humdrum routines of employment woe and childhood schooling and those strange logistical gymnastics of the human mating ritual.

His hands are sweating.

He folds them on the table, and taps his foot.

One of the shops nearby is playing some American pop song, and from its neighbor there is a competing jingle of traditional music, that wonderful vibration deep in the throat of the female singer, who reproduces sounds that to his English accustomed ear are for a moment tinged with that alien joy of the uncomprehending child, who need not understand to bask.

He takes a sip of his water.

In the reflection of his glass he tweaks his tie and straightens the collar he fussed over for a solid five minutes. The day's heat has melted obligingly into the moon's cool lace which lies draped along the table, so his curls are still crisp, and his naked cheeks pink with remembered health.

He licks his lips.

The folded hands tap one another in a flurry, finger to finger to finger, they are brought in a neat triangle to his nose, which he rests on them for a moment, then fisted beneath his chin.

He'll know the moment she enters the restaurant; she will trail that soft tropical cloud of the perfume she was wearing when he alighted on her balcony and with heart in his throat waited for her to step forward or to retreat, the curls will bounce charmingly on her shoulders, and the slender limbs peek enticingly free of the red hemline he last week inched slowly up her thighs till she could straddle him unhindered-

Someone drops into the chair across from him.

"You just keep popping up, don't you?"

Enzo spreads his hands. "I had such a good time last time. Do you remember when you walked into your hotel expecting Caroline in some slutty little negligee and found me in your bed instead? Good times, mate. That was my best side. I'm not quite sure what your problem was." He waves the waitress over. "Hello, love. I can't sort out your menu; what do you recommend?"

She rattles off some fish special.

"Perfect," Enzo tells her, and winks.

Enzo sits forward in his chair, reaching over the table to gather the small bouquet he has carefully bundled himself and tied in blue ribbon. "For me? You shouldn't have."

He does not sulk through Enzo's first course, but merely maintains the sort of steely silence which is more than this man deserves.

"I'm sorry Caroline couldn't make it tonight. Something something, Klaus is a wanker." Enzo lifts his hands helplessly. "I believe she's cavorting with that…what's his name, again?" He clicks his fingers in rapid succession, wrinkling his brow with the great strain of thinking. No doubt it plagues him terribly. "Very tall, brown hair…Tim, that's it. You know, I don't know why she cut out tonight, mate. I find you charming." He puts down his fork and wipes his mouth, then leans forward across the table to tangle their hands together. "But you're so quiet tonight. Something on your mind?"

He yanks back, nearly overturning his chair.

"Don't be like that, love."

"If you want to keep your spleen, I recommend you remove yourself from this table and retrieve Caroline from wherever you've stowed her."

"She's not a suitcase, you twat. Anyway, I thought we were having a nice chat."

He takes a moment to compose himself, quietly, without those revelatory tics of clenched fists and shut eyes. This man is an insect, and he a god; to be fretted by the fecal legs tickling along his hand is nonsense. To react, whatsoever, when he could smash the head between his thumb and forefinger, when this toddler was in those providential trenches just new to his 27th year and he to his 916th.

He folds his hands on the table and looks up from beneath his lashes; Enzo appears unfazed, but he'll change that. He always has. Every man has his seams; it's only a matter of determining where to insert one's chosen tool and pry until the crack widens.

"I suppose it ought to be no surprise that you've attached yourself to Caroline. A dog always needs a master to trail after, doesn't he, and that Damon Salvatore chap left you, after all. What a terrible thing: to have only one friend, one true bosom companion in all your years, to devote yourself to him entirely, and to understand in the very moment of your greatest need that in fact he was never a friend at all. He was only amusing himself because eventually one's ceiling is no longer preferable to his cell mate, even a cell mate like you."

He has scored his first hit: Enzo's shoulders immediately tighten. His face is so carefully blank that it is obvious he has jabbed something vulnerable indeed.

"You know Damon."

The waitress allows him that dramatic pause he does so appreciate, thank you, love, that was nicely-timed, and again inquires after his own order as she places Enzo's plate before him. He flashes his dimples in their full wattage at her, and politely declines.

He'll share with his mate, of course.

"How do you know Damon?" Enzo asks, rather demandingly, bit familiar of him, but then he always has overstepped his bounds.

"I know everyone," he replies, and slides the plate across the table toward himself, unfolding his napkin with much flair. "Hold on, sweetheart," he says to one of the passing waitresses, and turns his eyes from his dining companion to reward her with their full attention. "Could you bring me a nice white wine? Something dry. I'll leave it to your discretion."

"Where is he?" Enzo asks with such satisfying hoarseness when the server smiles and flutters her lashes and is off to do his bidding. You can't manufacture that. Well, he could. Not this maggot. He always did fail in the controlling of that rather expressive face; you can see the desperation shining from every pore. Oh, love him, love him, cruel world! Has he not cowered at your feet and licked at your hand long enough to deserve the fond caress rather than the absentminded pat, has he not anticipated your every whim and catered to your every demand? Is love not a just reward for his devotion, for that unshakeable allegiance of the mutt who, once discarded, loves his next abuser more fervently still?

"Oh, Damon?" he says with some surprise, with that distracted lilt of the afterthought. He flips his hand dismissively. "Somewhere wandering the other side of the veil, I imagine."

"He's dead?" Enzo asks, and his hands grip the table with such force the wood splits. This is a mortal blow: his face is instantly devoid of all its unnatural color, the fever which the mere name of the elder Salvatore appears to whip up in him snuffed, the lips thin, white, trembling a little: the adam's apple bobs heavily.

"Yes," he lies with the smoothness of practice. The waitress returns to set his wine before him, and he smiles up at her, takes a sip, swirls it carefully round his mouth. "Excellent choice, love. Bring my friend a glass as well. He's had a bit of a shock."

He leans across the table when she is gone. There is an intimacy in the line of his torso, an openness; to slant yourself toward someone like this is to take their entire confidence in hand, to invite a confession not extracted by vampiric sorcery, but rather legitimate faith: the human soul wants to unburden itself; the monster's is no less weighted. It yearns for a receptacle, and finds such a vessel in the canted body, the sympathetic eyes, the tender hands which flit, non-intrusively, over the clenched fists.

"It's regrettable; I assume you wanted such an honor for yourself. Circumstances, however, demanded his demise. You should know," he says, lowering his voice, and from underneath his eyelashes conjuring the same look which has lured kings and peasants alike, "he didn't ask for you. I imagine he might have said something like, "Enzo who?" if I had mentioned you in his final moments. He suffered terribly; that might be of some relief to you, at least."

Enzo looks away.

Magnificent.

When a man can no longer maintain eye contact, when he has ceased to measure his attributes alongside your own, when there is no longer the implicit promise of the stronger handshake in his gaze, you have at last conquered him: he is, perhaps metaphorically, perhaps literally, on his knees before you. You have already destroyed him. Whether he is tomb-bound or still in possession of his inconsequential breaths is no matter.

He stands.

The chair is pushed in against the table and his napkin thrown down beside his plate.

He presses himself close behind Enzo's chair, leaning forward so the boy can feel his breath on his nape, speaking directly into his ear so the lips brush the hot skin there.

Perhaps pre-Caroline, he might have urged him down against the table, slid his hand along the thigh, felt the inevitable arousal his presence provokes, taken it into his mouth, made this boy shudder and gasp and grip with ashamed reluctance the bobbing curls.

He drops one of his hands from the arm rest to Enzo's right thigh. "You're welcome to my leftovers, mate. I believe I'm finished here," he whispers, and pulls away with a satisfied smile.

He departs for his hotel in such a good mood he whistles all the way back to it.

* * *

He sees Tim off at the airport, with Caroline and Enzo accompanying him. Caroline wrestles him into a good-bye hug; Enzo slaps him on the shoulder; he and Tim clasp hands and complete the manly 21st century approximation of an embrace, bumping their shoulders into one another, each clapping the other on his back.

"You can't _bro hug_ ," Caroline scolds them. "You're in love!"

"Will this make you feel better, darling?" he asks, and grabs Tim by the face, kissing him so hard he staggers back against the roped-off security line, upending the entire section with a clatter. "Well, I hope you're happy. Now he has to get on the plane with a boner. Have you ever tried to masturbate in one of those little toilets, darling? Just terrible, what you've done to him."

Tim punches him in the shoulder.

"Tell your mother all about your handsome boyfriend," he calls after him, and watches Tim throw his rucksack onto the conveyer belt to be screened.

"Are you ok?" Caroline asks, and touches his arm.

"I'm grand, darling," he says, and turns away as that hat vanishes beyond the body scanner.

* * *

His efforts to interrupt Caroline's classes are half-hearted. He has by his count only two and by Caroline's four incidences of phone sex.

His crimes are uninspired; his victims die almost quietly.

His murders are wearing him.

It's quite disappointing.

He spends, he is ashamed to say, his afternoons in the hotel and his evenings in their designated poker room. He works his way through the books he has pinched from Tim's rucksack, and, having consumed the complete works of Shakespeare which he knows Tim stowed in his pack for just such a purpose as this, is now reviving his Russian with 'Ponedelneek nacheenaetcya v subbotu'. His brain rather clumsily wrangles the modern lexicon; he should probably have turned to some golden classic or another, perhaps one of Dostoevsky's ravings.

He is not reading now.

He is thinking about his brother.

Maybe you can't understand; he's not a brother anymore, you could argue.

You could argue that.

Nik is a fascist. Is it love of one's country, people, comrades that drives a dictator to his throne- of course not. He alights it in that rosy aureole of his own self-admiration. Father took Nik's love and twisted it into something else; when you make it into something of which you should be ashamed, it becomes so ugly. It can't just disappear; it's not a quiet emotion. But it has to trick itself; it has to fool its own flesh. It has to feel sorry for itself, and to be revolted by that emotion, and to determine: see, to love, to love is a terrible, weak, human thing.

And we are gods.

But Nik sat beside his ashy corpse, and wept like a boy.

It was probably their first legitimate interaction in ten centuries, when he could be sure there was no ulterior motive, and the tears were not that crocodile grief of the professional thespian.

So he thought-

He thought-

When he told the Bennett witch to send him back into the arms of his family, there was going to be a fundamental shift. Nik would be humbled off his throne. For his lost brother there was going to be a new feeling; there was going to be a new acceptance. He was not going to be punished for Nik's shame.

So you see why he always has some excuse for Nik. You see he always has some hope.

You see why there is always a second chance.

* * *

Enzo is, of course, thrown by their interaction; any inferior is when confronted with the full force of his efforts.

But he is not long stunned.

His social media accounts are hacked once more; there is a slew of new pictures and self-congratulatory posts. Twice he is interrupted during his outings with Caroline by the 'fortuitous' arrival of Enzo, who puts an arm round his shoulders and eats most of whatever it is he has compelled from the street vendors.

When he senses the presence beyond the door of his hotel room, he does not bother to study it more closely; it's a man, of course.

Of _course_ , this bloody _insect_ , to this, to _this_ , Caroline chooses to attach herself-

It's Kol.

He freezes in the doorway.

His brother is sitting on his bed, his back against the headboard. He is completely still for once; the hands are folded demurely in his lap. He looks terrible: unshaven, ill-fed, tired, the shaggy bangs in his hollow eyes.

"Kol," he says, involuntarily. There is a catch in his voice they both pretend not to notice. He shuts the door behind him so carefully, as though a too aggressive clicking of the latch will frighten away this sudden miracle.

"Nik," his brother asks without looking at him, "why did you dagger me?"

* * *

 **Petrograd 1917**

In February, winter sounds the railroads' death knell: under burden of sadistic cold and cataclysmic snow, 1,200 locomotive boilers freeze and explode.

In total, 57,000 railroad cars sleep away their February; they are entombed with such little panache, the snowflakes falling and falling, and with their great white palms merely erasing these slumbering beasts as if the first pickaxe of modernity never did break the soil and sully this endless white tundra with man's intrusive footpaths.

The flour dries up and blows away; watch it float, a mere mist above the Horseman's noble bronze head. The last coal in the last fireplace has sputtered and died ignobly; wood dwindles, is reserved with miserly panic, disappears altogether.

And this breaks Petrograd's back; it is too heavy a straw to bear. They have watched their sugar melt away as on some divine tongue and into this great impersonal machine called war cranked their sons and their husbands and suffered in their lengthening ration lines while the cinemas jangle with untouchable lights and insurmountable ticket costs and the nobility sparkles unconcernedly and from their warm theatres with the lights that drip like butter -recall, sons of Russ, that fresh yellow miracle- emerge laughing and laughing and to their throats pulling more closely the furred collars and the sprightly scarves.

A human can watch himself suffer for some time; he will endure endless miseries for want of, what- perhaps willpower, imagination, self-preservation; perhaps this millstone Hunger grinds it out of him, and between gears crushes his spirit and deposits him limply into the arms of these waiting ration lines, who welcome him into their own miserable bosoms. There is comradeship in wretchedness: see the long lines of soldiers to whom mud has become a new style of dress, another offering on that bland menu of stale rye bread; he grins round it because the man beside him does the same, he has not yet split, he has not yet bolted before the approaching tank and tossed his rifle screaming into the abyss. It isn't good manners to put your shoulder to misery when the man beside you bears it with neither complaint nor acknowledgement.

But on March 8th, these long-suffering bread lines reach their peak of suffering: to stand in the Russian cold for three hours, blowing at the tips of your fingers, stamping your feet, huddling up behind your neighbor for what little human warmth belches from beneath the stove of his ratty overcoat; wouldn't you look at the red fingertips and the white protrusion of your neighbor's ears, already dying with frostbite, see overhead the lumbering clouds, promising another storm- wouldn't you feel inside your breast that sudden broken dam of all life's injustices battering you simultaneously, and in your own regional slang declare to this impervious sky, to this impatient baker, to the hole which has substituted your stomach, "bugger this"?

And so they do.

The bakery windows are smashed; steaming loaves are grabbed bare-handed, and cradled like babes. The little flat cakes which are to be served for guests with their afternoon tea are consumed wolfishly; through the smashed windows women toss their children every lacy delicacy which can be snatched up from the displays.

Like Dublin before them, they strew their shops underfoot, and crunch them like inconsequential gravel.

He takes Bekah to watch.

Across the Neva bridges flood workers from the Vyborg section, advancing on the city center, and in the Nevsky prospekt, a great parade of women swells from unknown quarters to take up the chant for bread.

There is little violence; perhaps Petrograd is simply tired of it, or too hungry to stomach anything but its own gnawing pangs.

Still, the Cossacks are dispersed, and clop uneasily down the streets, calling to the protestors, here and there stopping for a chat, and ensuring this starving mass finds no greater hunger to distract its grumbling stomach.

But Petrograd is mostly unperturbed; perhaps a few classless nonentities have stepped out of line, but the theatres are uninterrupted, the dinner parties seamlessly enacted; the restaurants still chime with that effervescent combination of women's laughter and scraping china.

So do the best of us careen innocently to our ends.

Next morning, the crowds have noticeably increased, and the Cossacks are discharged once more into the streets, to banter in easy camaraderie with these cheerful mobs, who have immediately noticed that the gloved hands are sans their whips. If yesterday the bakeries were assaulted, today they are utterly violated; you see the invalid soldiers carrying as much as their arms can bear, every variation on the tired front line rye which can be found in the baker's own meager stock.

On Saturday, the workers strike.

The trains halt; the trolley cars lie eerily silent on their tracks; no more is there a newsboy hawking his thick sheaf of morning gossip, and now in the hands of these ever-growing crowds there sprout red banners. The shouts take on a new edge; they have more grievances to air: start with the bread, move on to the traitors. With one's belly full, there is a whole universe of unspoken injustices to be spilt; the tongue no longer dreams of flour; it tastes again all the different layers of its intellect, remembers, there are worlds and fears and wrongs beyond this eternal ache.

"Down with the German woman; down with Protopov!" they shout. "Down with the war!"

Petrograd huddles in a little closer on itself. The dinner parties are anxiously halted, and their participants stand listening into the snowy nights; at the Maryinsky theatre, the violinist George Enesco gives a concert to only fifty people.

He sits for a while at the base of the Horseman with his eyes closed, a faint smile on his lips.

You can taste fear like this; into the snow its little polyps are flushed, so that all round him the air is saturated with that expectant hush of an entire city holding its breath. Never have two million people sounded so rural; one's voice could feel out over the Neva for miles, and find nothing off which to ricochet.

"It's too quiet. It's got boring now," Rebekah tells him with a pout so like Kol's that he ruffles her hair, for which his wrist is nearly broken; he has ruined an hour of fastidious work, she complains.

Easy, easy, love; you'll have your blood. A mob does not boil up, and impotently fade at the lip of the pot.

And so Sunday peeks tentatively through the winter shroud; those early risers with morning roses in their cheeks find posters pasted up over every surface they can spy: All assemblies and public meetings are verboten, in the German whore's barbarian tongue, and will be discouraged with violence. Those workers who marched with such pride behind their red flags are to return to their jobs on Monday, or face conscription and the front lines.

There is no snow this morning.

Rebekah stands beside him, fluffing the collar of her coat.

The posters are completely disregarded; a vast seawall from the Vyborg quarter foams over the Neva bridges into the city.

And the soldiers emerge.

Silkily they slither from their barracks, with an unassuming silence. But who are they, these noble guardians of the Tsar's peace: those merry Cossacks in their towering black hats with the carefully greased moustaches, the hands innocently blank, the horses chomping with easy boredom at their bits- no, here rolls all the flotsam which war has dragged in its wake and tossed aside, the uncomprehending peasants, the fresh young academy graduates, this confused mass with less discipline than the mob, these cherubic babes who have never seen a trench line, who have never known a mortar, who have never smeared their bread with mud in lieu of their butter, who have never drilled with their rifles, who have barely caressed their stocks, who have no quarrel with the people, and every with the Tsar-

The first shots are fired on the Nevsky Prospekt, across from the Anitchkov Palace.

But these are somewhat of an anomaly, and coaxed from the soldiers with much encouragement; a company of the Volinsky Regiment refuses altogether, and fires their rifles into the air. The Pavlovsky Life Guards are still more stubborn: they will not fire at all, and when the matter is pressed, they turn on their officer and shoot him instead.

This is the most tenuous of moments: if a ruler has not his army, he has nothing. He has lost control of his capital; he has instead of a crown a noose; what trend the soldiers set the people will follow.

But 300 years have always sparked in some hot breast a frisson of loyalty which, when confronted, will inflame rather than fade.

And so in rides the prestigious Preobrajensky Guard to disarm the mutineers and banish them back to the barracks from which they crept.

The crowd is reduced to a grumbling simmer; Petrograd is restored to an uneasy silence which he explores with Bekah on his elbow.

To be present at a moment like this, when history has come roaring in instead of tiptoeing past out of sight, when only hindsight will recall, ah, yes, that was the moment, there was the turning point: no, you can feel in the air, you can see in the hushed trams which peer with that eerie silence of the dead carnival into the white and pinched faces of the passersby, here is the brink. There is no careful foot which will not crumble its precipice.

You are almost lured into an uneasy gratefulness: there are no cabs, and those sparse patrols of soldiers on the quays reveal all is not yet quite right, but outside the Radziwill mansion there is a long line of those gleaming vehicles which only Petrograd's finest can afford, and inside the strains of a cheerful party, shooting from behind every curtain those decadent yellow fingers of the electric lamps.

And yet.

Monday, oh Monday, bestill his heart: speak sweetly your soft endearments into his loving ear. Monday, fair Monday, with the frost like stars in your accoutrements, those crackling rivers of the shop glass, the dumb trams sans their merry bells, sans their flashing lights, those rare hansoms which pass at a wary trot, the horses snorting their white fire-

In the morning, the city is still in the Tsar's hands, by night the Duma's.

Heed not Iurenev's gloomy prediction: "The unrest in the barracks is subsiding. Indeed, it is clear that the working class and the soldiery must go different ways. We must not rely on daydreams for a revolution, but on systematic propaganda at the works and the factories in store for better days."

Indeed, the soldiers have linked arms with the people; in the early hours of this fateful Monday, a Volinsky sergeant kills his captain; the remaining officers hastily remove themselves from this precarious situation.

The Volinsky regiment marches out with full band.

To this mutinous example the others slowly add themselves: first the Semonovsky, the Ismailovsky, the Litovsky, the Oranienbaum Machine Gun Regiment, and at last the grand finale, you might say, the piece de resistance, formed by Peter the Great himself: the Preobrajensky Guard which so tidily discouraged these former enemies a mere twenty-four hours ago.

For the last time the Imperial flag of Russia flaps against the walls of the Fortress. The morning mists precede the revolution along the streets. There is a solemn hush over those watching from their windows: you hear the band trilling merrily through the fog, tolling somewhere under these sea-like movements of air and ice, but those struggling carts, gone, the trams, abandoned, the Neva dozing uneasily beneath its milky scrim of early March-

The regiments and the people meet joyously, but without flair: the fluttering red banners are absorbed among the machine guns. They march in step. The band has fallen silent.

Over this all there is the expectant hush of the theatre; the curtain has not yet stirred; the actors have taken their positions and the audience has ceased its murmurs, but still that heavy red velvet divides the tableau; the final act is still tensely anticipated.

On and on and on they march through these snowy streets, just the crunching of their feet in the snow.

The first frightened bystanders begin to appear in their doorways.

The first fire is set at the Law Courts; the arsenal is breeched; machine gun fire shatters this anxious silence. One after another, the other conflagrations bloom: the Arsenal on the Liteiny, the Ministry of the Interior, the Military Government Building; the flames leap to the Okhrana headquarters and a handful of police stations.

By noon the sun has broken; the mists have cleared.

The Fortress of Peter and Paul has fallen, adding its heavy artillery and 25,000 soldiers to the revolution.

By sunset, 66,000 have forsaken their tsar and joined the People.

* * *

In its third century of rule, the Romanov dynasty crumbles.

On March 15th, 1917, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Kazan, Astrakhan, of Poland, of Siberia, of Tauric Chersonese and of Georgia, Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov II, abdicates his throne.

* * *

 **A/N: 'Banffy's diaphanous mists and cherries like polished diamonds are just ink; he could have poured all of himself into them...' This is a reference to Miklos Banffy's 'The Translyvanian Trilogy'.**

 **The Chinese porno with the penis push-ups is real, because God loves us.**

 **Some notes on the flashbacks: Rasputin's death is somewhat disputed. Youssopov and Purishkevitch both claim he was poisoned, shot, and then beaten (though Purishkevitch was not actually present for the supposed poisoning, so his narrative is mostly taken secondhand from Youssopov), but Rasputin's autoposy showed no cyanide in his system. The reasons for these discrepancies are unknown; early 20th century CSI techniques may have just been lacking, or perhaps Youssopov embellished to make the assassination more dramatic, and to play into Rasputin's mystical reputation. At any rate, the only play by play we have to go by is that related by the men who were involved, so that's what I have based the flashback on, since it is essentially (through Klaus' peeping) from their perspective.**

 **'To give Stolypin Rimsky-Korsakov's 'The Tale of Tsar Saltan'-this is a reference to the assassination of Pyotr Stolypin, a Russian prime minister who was shot at a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's 'The Tale of Tsar Saltan' in 1911.**

 **The second flashback is actually a description of the February Revolution. You might be wondering why the dates mentioned are all pretty much in March-this is because Russia did not switch over from the Julian calendar until 1918. The February Revolution actually took place in March, according to the Gregorian calendar. I debated about which dates to use, and decided upon the Gregorian ones, since it's from Klaus' perspective. The Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582, and Britain and its colonies switched over in 1752, in line with most of the rest of Western Europe, so since this is the calendar he would be most used to, I decided he'd likely default to thinking in those dates.**

 **References to 'the Horseman' are talking about The Bronze Horseman, a statue of Peter the Great which stands in St. Petersburg.**

 **The Duma was an elected legislative body in Russia that dealt with the imperial Russian legislature. They took over during the February Revolution, forming the Provisional Government, which was then overthrown by the Bolshevik party in the October Revolution.**

 **Nicholas II's full title was: Emperor and Autocrat of All Russia, Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod; Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan, Tsar of Poland, Tsar of Siberia, Tsar of Chersonese Taurian, Tsar of Georgia; Lord of Pskov and Grand Prince of Smolensk, Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia, Finland; Prince of Estland, Livland, Courland, Semigalia, Samogitia, Belostok, Karelia, Tver, Yugorsky land, Perm, Vyatka, Bolgar and others; Lord and Grand Prince of Nizhny Nogorod, Chernigov, Ryazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Yaroslavl, Belozersk, Udorsky land, Obdorsk, Kondia, Vitebsk, Mstislav, and all of the northern countries Master; and Lord of Iberia, Kartli, and Kabardia lands and Armenian provinces; Circassian and Mountainous Princes and their Hereditary Lord and Owner; Lord of Turkestan; Norwegian Heir; Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Stormarn, Dithmarschen, and Oldenburg, and others, and others, and others.**

 **As you can see, toward the end even they got sick of that bullshit.**

 **Thanks a million for reading, and see you next time!**


	4. Part Four

**So. Here we are. The Final Update. I'm actually going to do a long write-up over on tumblr after I post this, so I won't babble on for too long in this author's note. This series has been such a long time in the making (less than four years in reality, but my brain insists I started it at least a century ago) that I can't let it go without one long, rambling footnote, so if you want to read some of my thoughts on the series overall, its ending, and most especially my immense gratitude to those of you who are, for some unknown reason, still here, you can keep an eye on my tumblr over the next couple of days. (If you aren't already following me: I'm under CBK1000 on there as well.)**

 **I'm not going to type up three pages of historical notes, firstly because I'm lazy, secondly because I really don't think any of you want to be subjected to that, and last of all because revolutionary Russia was a chaotic, violent place with lots of unpronounceable names, political musical chairs, and a seemingly neverending conveyor belt of various rebellions, small and large, successful and aborted. You will see a lot of names that you probably cannot pronounce; just go with it, and assume these names belong to a bunch of old dead dudes who were somehow involved in the messy politics of that particular era. I do not have the space within a flashback to do anything more than a very extensive summary, as even I'm not inclined to write a 500 page flashback, so there are, as per usual, a lot of details crammed into a small space, some of which may be a little murky if you're not well-acquainted with the time period.**

 **However, some references to help you:**

 **When Klaus refers to 'that Kornilov rubbish', he's talking about what's known as the Kornilov affair, which was a military coup staged in 1917 by General Lavr Kornilov against the Provisional Government. The coup failed and Kornilov was relieved of his position and imprisoned.**

 **'Vsya vlact k Sovetam' means 'All power to the Soviets.'**

 **Tsarskoe Selo was at the time a town that housed some of the Imperial residences. It was there, in the Alexander Palace, where the Romanovs were first imprisoned after Nicholas II abdicated his throne.**

 **I'd also like to take a moment to explain the Russian patronymic, which does pop up from time to time, and may cause some confusion, especially as Nicholas II is referred to by his name and patronymic at one point, rather than as Nicholas Romanov. So, all Russians have what is called a 'patronymic', which is basically their middle name. This is always some derivative of the father's name. Women have a patronymic which ends in either 'ovna' or 'evna'; men 'ovich' or 'evich'. It simply means 'son of' or 'daughter of'. So if your father's name is Aleksandr, for instance, your patronymic would be 'Aleksandrovich' if you're a man, and 'Aleksandrovna' if you're a woman. If you're on formal terms with a Russian, you would refer to them by their first name and patronymic, and that's how they would likely introduce themselves to you.**

 **Last but not least: in the eighth fic, there is a flashback in which Kol is daggered, apparently for having betrayed Klaus and brought Mikael to New Orleans. Klaus was absolutely convinced of this, but Kol insisted he had nothing to do with it, and there were hints throughout the fic that something hinky was going on with a certain other family member. This flashback is a direct continuation of that particular family drama. Because if you can explain something in a couple of lines, why not instead wait two years to dramatically unfold the rest of the story against the backdrop of World War I and the Russian Revolution? Klaus would be so proud of me.**

* * *

 **Alexandria, 2014**

Do you want to know how their story ends, brother? To hear his sad tale of woe which perhaps begins 'once upon a time' or 'There was a man named Klaus, son of Mikael'; it does not matter the culture or individual orator's tongue he mimics: it is the same cold tale with no lesson to be learned at the end. Sad, pathetic Koschei, who spirited his death away in an egg, and so obsessed over this object which possessed no beating heart, which had no brother's warmth, which never looked up at him with a worshipper's confident fever: to prize a throne and not a man, to value the reputation and not a smile: 'the fool doth think he is wise' indeed.

Mankind progresses like so: he has a goodness inside himself. His goodness must be a universal goodness: there are no other kinds. He sermonizes it, gifts it to the masses, cedes to the senseless mob this concept of goodness which will become the yardstick of future generations. Let every man be judged by this first man's individual code.

He had, he believes, the same goodness in him, once. He must have: there was nothing else for which to love him.

But you needn't be subject to a senseless rehashing of the centuries which re-shaped him, so he could rise as something not quite a man, not quite a monster, not quite a brother, something which, if in its grotesqueness could not be loved, could at least be admired, feared, respected. These are adequate enough substitutions: some men, father told him, are destined for nothing. And so he chased notoriety.

You want to hear there is no hope for him: he has only empty regrets. He has worn your brother's face for ten centuries and inhabited it for perhaps only nine, and for the next ten and the ten beyond that he will animate the mask, but never adequately replicate this 'Nik': his gestures will always be half a beat off.

"Why did you dagger me, Nik?" Kol asks again. "Or perhaps I should rephrase: why did you never _undagger_ me? You babbled some nonsense about bringing Father down on you, but it wasn't me. And you must have known that. You know everything, eventually. So why did you leave me in there?"

Oh, little brother, little brother.

To watch you standing on the precipice, when the smallest of steps will carry you away from him for all his endless life.

He sits down on the edge of the bed.

He folds his hands between his knees.

There are some things which are got at with only a titanic struggle: in him there is a sort of internal Waterloo. To lose all semblance, structure, shape of words when in your earliest infant stages you babbled these untasted noises with a child's bold exploration.

He shuts his eyes.

* * *

 **Petrograd, 1917**

Nik returns to plugging away at that little war. She supposes the fun has gone out of Russia for him now: the political waters have momentarily settled, and his little boyfriends have been banished on account of Rasputin's murder.

Elijah has retired into exile with the royal family, of which he has grown inexplicably fond. A silly thing: seeking shades in human flesh.

Spring slowly banishes its predecessor; she prepares for the new ballet season. If the aristocracy's future is unknown, their arts are not. And every regime needs something pretty in a tutu to gawk at, after all. How else would a man convince himself of his good taste?

In the evenings she returns to the chicken hut in the woods.

Marya is just lovely; outside of her own, she's never seen breasts more flawless. She's pale in the way that otherworldly things are pale: nearly albino; it sets off her hair. When she looks up through her lashes, it's as calculated as Nik; a man doesn't look at you that way. He sweeps over your dimpled elbows, the maidenly blush, the pleasing eyes, the hint of the nape beneath cream-colored hair, piled artfully. He wants to touch something; he doesn't care what. He's artless in his admiration. He judges, but quickly; he has the lay of you in a moment.

A woman is more thorough.

When men watch from their seats they follow the coquettish tights up beneath her skirt and there subside into monotonous daydreams; something something, the shade of the curls there, the oafs.

Marya sits with her head tilted. She's not Nik; his seductions are obvious because he wants them to be. His net is visible because rare is the mortal who will not tangle themselves in it anyway.

But she can feel the girl sizing her up. She can feel her legs measured, her breasts weighed; the nape of her neck tingles. The eyes take their time; the hands, lips, tongue will do the same: here pretty, pretty, she says.

That's her line.

Marya oils her hair twice a week, with something that smells of rosemary, and each morning checks the looking glass for lines. "Pearl dust," she says; that's her secret. At night she dabs her skin carefully with lotions, and hisses something under her breath. "You're terribly lucky," Marya tells her. "The immortality, I mean. Perhaps I'll have my face scraped like that old Romanov crone. They take a sharpened spoon to your face and cut off the first layer, then moisturize the wound and apply lacquer to it. The dowager empress had it done. Nicholas needed youth at his side."

"They always do," she replies airily.

They don't really lure men to the hut; men are weak. Their penises will gladly find the way to their own ruin.

Sometimes when men come to the hut they are greeted as by those courtesans of old: the hut squats obligingly. Fair-haired Ivan (or whatever his name is; can she be bothered?) steps inside to find not the crone of his childhood tales, but instead those princesses of infancy with their hair like spun sugar. The house is redolent with tea; the samovar gently beckons him further. There is no harm in a helpless maiden and her tea. The floor is strewn with orchids; and so careless are the riches of these ladies who cohabitate their strange abode that they are poured into bowls and left to catch the candlelight. The opals crack open rainbows like fine thin yolk on the walls; the orchids, bruised beneath his wandering feet, suffer beautifully.

They take his coat.

When they are done, they leave him naked on the bed. Marya slits open his belly with a thin knife; she thinks they taste better if they're gutted before they are killed.

"I did this to my father," she says, casually, one evening. "My brother was in love with me. Papa, I told him, was similarly smitten. So Andrei -I think that was his name- killed our father. When I told him I had lied, he shot himself."

It's no wonder Nik finds her delightful.

There are two boys who come to them one evening; perhaps word has begun to spread. Perhaps they are mushroom hunting; fate is comically random that way.

She thinks of Kol when she takes their coats; he'd like the boy on the left, with the long brown bangs. He must be barely twenty; he has that sensitivity to his mouth that suggests a good kisser.

Marya has a wash tub in the middle of the main room; she's wearing her fair face, but is soaking in the company of several toads and snakes; her hair hides her breasts. There is a little black garter snake coiled on her belly, nearly indistinguishable from her hair.

"Are you doing a deed or fleeing a deed?" Marya asks, and smiles.

The boy with the long brown bangs is built like a soldier; she can feel his back muscles when she presses herself to him. "You can have anything you see," she whispers into his ear, and loosens her gown.

Marya doesn't want to kill the boy with the sensitive mouth; she puts him in a cage of bone.

He cries himself to sleep in the evenings, and is given his friend's head for comfort. Humans are such children: always whining after their security blankets.

Her favorite is the girl.

She slinks up to the hut one evening when the sun is losing its grip; her voice is shaking. She's pitched it lower to disguise it.

She's some kind of aristocrat: you can see it in the clarity of her skin; her cheeks have only ever been ruddy with rouge; no cooking pot steam has puckered this skin. She's dressed as a boy: the breasts are tied down underneath the white blouse, and the hair tucked up under a hat, but she's lovely: green eyes you could drown in. She imagines that's what Nik would say, only more terribly.

She knows what she's about, this girl, from one of the boys they released: you need a few flies to slip the web, after all.

Marya takes off her hat, so the hair tumbles down out of it, thick and blonde. She has lips pink as berries; her nipples must be the same color.

The girl says her name in a little whisper at their prompting: Amandine. Not a sweet Russian girl with the sturdy Tartar somewhere deep in her veins; a little French implant. She's never done this before: will the ladies be kind to her? She's from a good family; they mustn't know: they mustn't know.

When Marya unbuttons the girl's shirt, she twitches away; she crosses her arms over the pretty white curves that spring suddenly outward.

"Relax, darling," she murmurs into the girl's ear. That's what Kol would say: he'd say, a face like this, darling, really, and you don't trust it?

The girl's arms are slowly coaxed away; she has small breasts, sprightly with youth. You can see life has never marked her with any hardship.

When her neck is kissed, the girl tenses for a moment, and then, by small increments, relaxes into the lips that wander the graceful nape with its perfumed hair.

A woman requires patience; a man needs only a stare. A playful breeze will stiffen him. The two boys they made to watch while they undressed one another and kissed; they didn't need any other preparation. The boy with the sensitive mouth came when she slid her hand over Marya's plump white thigh and glided a finger over her clit.

The girl they undress with no sudden movements: girls can be tender when you have given them no reason to bite.

She is kissed and fondled between the two of them, arching at the brush of these warm breasts against her back, the careful insinuation of a knee between her thighs, the cautious hands that touch the mounds of her hips, slip down the legs, tell her with their careful explorations: easy, easy, lovely: there will be no rough intrusions.

"Touch yourself," she whispers into the girl's ear, and kisses it. "Show us what you like."

Marya bends her head over one of the bright soft nipples.

The girl is guided into her lap by Marya's gentle hands. She feels the girl's damp clit touch her own, the little awed shudder at this contact.

She shows the girl how to roll her hips while Marya watches.

You can feel the tension mounting in her soft white thighs. The breasts bounce beautifully; she reaches up to touch the hard little nipples, to tweak them beneath her fingertips, feeling the goose pimpled skin all around them, the tender peach-like tapering of the breast into the armpit.

"It would be a shame to cut her open," Marya says after the girl has finished, and gives her tea laced with cyanide like a civilized woman.

* * *

Sometimes she tires of the murders.

You will not believe her.

No one ever believes her; she will not let them. But there are only so many different ways you can bite into a human like a lamb, and listen to them bleat.

Sometimes she sits beside her brother, holding his hand. Nik and Elijah have trimmed his nails, and straightened his clothes; his bangs they leave to grow out, just a little, so they brush his eyebrows. Nik likes them that way; he used to put his fingers through them. He'd touch them so you couldn't doubt his love; that's always been Kol's problem.

She looks at the dagger in his chest and she remembers that in 1301 Kol took it from her own sleeping breast and tossed it at Nik's feet; he wore chain mail that hurt her eyes when the sun touched it. There was a whiff of red in his hair, there in the afternoon sun; sans her good taste, he was once more sprouting that horrid beard.

They stared at one another for a very long time, her brothers, and Kol never bowed. She remembers that: Nik had already re-forged himself; he could prostate a man with a look. But her brother walked right up to him. He threw the dagger at Nik's feet: he threw the dagger at Nik's feet and said, "Come for her again."

She does not take the dagger from him.

You can sit in judgement on her.

But Kol is not something you hold onto; you catch him briefly; he struggles in your palm; he is always going to love her, better than Nik, better than Elijah, better than any of her twit suitors: he tells her that. But you don't trust that kind of love; if it doesn't crush you, there's a sliver of untruth in it. There's a hole through which your intentions can slither; a true love must seal up any cracks. It must smother you in its desperation.

When she was a girl she would have disputed this. But she can be a monster or she can be a girl; she can't be both. She isn't good at being both. When you have a girl inside you struggling, like any seed, to put down roots, to hold up its arms to the sun, society spots such a thrashing innocent like any whaler spots his next seal, floundering in the foam. It wants you tarted out in silk and dolloped with lace, like any good cake gently snowed in between its mounds of wedding roses. It takes your soft and aching heart between its hands, and presses it into juice for the banquet.

So she sits beside her brother.

She touches his hair.

She does not touch his dagger.

She thinks: she could have left with him in London. He would have loved her, not like Nik, but like a man.

It's never worked out with a man. She's crushed every one of them. Perhaps they started it; perhaps they marked out the first blow. They sunk something sharp into her soft breast: another woman, perhaps. Kol wouldn't have done that: he can be faithful as men are not faithful, but he can't be loved as Nik has taught her to love.

Spring yawns and with one startled breath covers the whole of St. Petersburg in this velvety new season.

She revolves between stage and hut and brother; on some evenings she likes the smell of the fat dripping from Marya's bone cage into the cauldron which is stirred leisurely, between kisses. On others she ties the ribbons neatly round her ankles and dances till even her toes ache.

A girl would tell you: she's lonely. She wants Nik. She wants Kol. She wants to go home; she doesn't know where home is anymore.

But she is a monster. She can't afford to be anything else.

If she was a mother, she sometimes thinks, which is another thing you will not believe.

But don't all people (and she was a person once, oh God, she doesn't want to be one, not when it hurts, not when her brother is dead, not when Nik shed his skin and became something more, not something better, just something _more_ ) feel a softness in their hand? Do they not want to touch something with love, and have it lean into them? Do they not see something helpless and just sometimes, perhaps just once, feel in them a yearning toward it, toward all the soft bits of it, where the world has not yet reached- do their predatory urges not sink for a moment beneath this sudden surge of tenderness? Have you never felt the ache in your throat, and crouched down next to something small, when the human instinct has said, crush it beneath your boot?

Something penned by man might tell you, Fate is cruel. Fate isn't cruel; fate is nonchalant. Man is cruel. You will lick a child from your lips just as eagerly as she. In three years, you have crushed millions of them for some land.

She does watch the children sometimes.

Of course she isn't tenderly inclined toward the brats: forget what she said earlier.

But she's held Kol's hand and it's cold, and she's stroked his hair, and she's tweaked his bow, and he never leans into her like a cat; he never touches his head to her hand with that artful innocence of something that just wants to be taken care of.

So she watches the children.

Children are always honest, and they tell her she's pretty.

She said to Nik once: tell me I'm pretty.

I don't have anything else.

She had a womb, once.

That's what a man truly loves: not her but her motherhood, where she will store in good faith that budding likeness of himself. That's what he loves: that's what he loves, just himself in miniature, she thinks, and kills a drunk soldier on his way back to his flat.

* * *

There is a girl, pretty as a doll, who walks to the Horseman every day with her mother.

She watches them for a week.

The girl is called Vasilisa; she wears purple ribbons in her hair, not a simple purple, something troubled, something you'd find in Shelley's haunted crags; a heliotrope, perhaps. They bring out gradations of violet in her blue eyes. If a clockmaker wound a key in her spine and stood back to watch with the mottled elation of someone who has created a masterpiece they will never surpass, you could not have a more perfect creation.

When a mother births her first, she loses her name; she cedes it for the title of 'mother' like a new patronymic by which she will always be called. And so she knows the young woman simply as 'mama'; Vasilisa and Mama, that's what she watches for. There is never a father; perhaps he is away at the war; perhaps he has been killed by it. You can never tell with humans; they're so frail.

The girl has two spots of red in her cheeks; she likes to put her feet heel to toe when she walks, clacking the front of one shoe against the back of the other. Her hair, gold, not blonde, you could never give it so rough a name, touches the waist of her little purple dress.

They could have been sisters; do you want to be her sister, lovely thing? She'd have brushed your hair and killed your boys; you might have feared one for a moment, and only a moment.

"What a lovely girl," she says to Mama one morning in French, casually, and smiles at Vasilisa.

The girl looks at her very frankly. She says, "Mama and I are walking, not making friends," the little bitch, and turns up her nose. Kol would like her.

"Vasilisa!" Mama scolds, and makes her shake hands. She has tiny fingers, very pale; you could crush them like porcelain. She doesn't; she likes the child, for some reason. It's clearly spoilt; an only spawn. No one has ever ventured a mere suggestion of refusal in her direction. She has four brothers; she understands how such girls crown themselves, and crow over their own self-imposed coronations, real as any jeweled ceremony where the diamonds are plentiful as water, and every knee vigilant on the coldest of January parquets.

"Enjoy your walk," she tells them, and rustles away on down the street.

* * *

She kills Mama the next morning.

Vasilisa turns in circles at the base of the Horseman, looking for her. Death is cheap; it's not like bread. You can come by it at any corner. A human can step wrong and fall through into another world; it's nothing to get all sniffly about.

She crouches down in front of the girl, folding her hands in her lap. "Would you like to come back to the palace with me?"

Vasilisa is practical; she likes that in a girl. She's ten, decyat, she says, forgetting to respond in French. She has a calculation in her, perhaps ripened by the war, perhaps sharpened by the ration lines; she forgets Mama. Children usually do. You were a warm house for a little while; for a little while, there was awe in their eyes. But celebrity is fleeting; so too will your star blink out. A sun is so mundane, when you have lived long enough in its rays and understood it will slink out from behind every winter, always, always. That's what a mother is to her daughter: always, always. Mama is somewhere: it is good enough.

"You're from the palace?" Vasilisa asks, tapping her shoes against one another. She adjusts the cuffs of her gloves like a little lady.

"Yes."

"Do you have cakes? We can't get cakes anymore."

She smiles.

She holds out her hand to the girl.

Come, pretty, pretty, she says.

* * *

"Rebekah," Elijah sighs with fatherly patience when she leads the girl into the Alexander Palace by the hand. "We've talked about this."

"There's nothing to worry about, Elijah. I'll remember to feed it this time."

* * *

He returns, prophetically, on July 4; he always did have a good nose for these things.

His first view of Petrograd sans the dusty interloper of the train window is of worker tunics; perhaps they are striking again. Once a people have been shaken and all the silt, those soiled secret imaginings of every human who feels himself downtrodden, has risen at last to the surface, seldom are the waters returned to pristine complacence. Human storms strike with a frequency not recreated in Mother Nature: even the clouds can brew only so many thunder bolts.

He steps down onto the platform dressed in the uniform he pinched from a dead Russian grenadier, cap under his arm. The breeze tickles his newly shaven face, fresh from the razor; Bekah will be pleased. He did contemplate a nice moustache, fabulously waxed, but depending upon his dear sister's mood, she might tear it off. He'd hate to have to dagger her over something so petty.

Well, let's not be timid: 'hate' is a rather strong condemnation. Try entertaining her with the best wit to have ever graced the theatrical stage and getting not so much as an appreciative blink. One can only take so much ungratefulness.

He muses over whether he should pop into one of the nearby restaurants for a bowl of watery borsch and some boiled turnips, or if he ought to take one of the steam trams further into the city where the bourgeois flood those few restaurants with the exorbitant prices which only a miracle such as white bread can these days demand. He'll have a proper meal later tonight, but he needs something to take the edge off; he hasn't fed in days.

Perhaps a fat grouse, clad in butter, adrift on his little pond of sour cream, his tender sacrifice dripping obligingly right off the bone; you can taste a French hand in his seasoning, and this slick of pale gold, this long-forgotten wonder, runs down the chin with each unhindered sinking of the teeth. One of the better restaurants might have a thin slice of cake to spare, or a plate of strawberries crowned in those little snowy mountaintops of sugar.

He spots an automobile full of Red Guards, and instead buys some pickled herring from a street stand.

Near Alexander Park, he encounters a fat column of sailors, perhaps several thousand strong, marching in the company of a full band, and carrying banners which proclaim Vsya vlast k Sovetam.

A revolution is never satisfied with an even distribution of power; to share with those former jailers who reclined in marble halls and danced on gilded slippers is not freedom; let open the cell and mingle freely with these 'hereditary bloodsuckers', these Germans, these traitors, these _capitalists_? No, no; and anyway, only when socialism is given free rein and the people are allowed to distribute their own goods, only when the one percent stop skimming off the top and lining their own pockets with these whimsical dreams of 'beef' 'butter' 'sugar' (surely such things have never existed; planet earth herself is a dense rye, hard as a brick, yes, try to dig through to China, ha, you won't get past the stony crust) can Russia truly declare herself free. Then will she rise; then will Europe exalt in her. When she has thrown off the shackles of her dynasty and snatched those sleepy maidens in lavender-scented manor houses, when they are wallowing in the streets like her soldiers, like her children, when the academics have uprooted those bejeweled liars, those leftover relics of the Romanovs who still poison the Provisional Government, then can she say to her people, hail Revolution, hail Lenin, hail Russ, Land of the Free, Land of the Golden, Land of the People. Like America before her she will pave her sidewalks in bullion and pearl; she will build whole tributaries of butter and cream; children can gather at their troughs and dip whole armfuls of bread and remove them, Midas-coated.

He pops a herring into his mouth.

The sailors march all the way to Bolshevik headquarters where Iakov Sverdlov, Lunarcharskii, Podvoiskii and M. Lashevich call down to them from the balcony. Lenin himself shuffles his feet in a rare display of oratory timidity; an excuse is quickly spun that he will not lecture to them due to a budding illness. But you don't put off these sorts of crowds: they have disobeyed orders to stand here, to have their blood quickened, to rustle their banners and to crash their brass; let them be one throat, roaring altogether, let them as one condemn or condone your words.

He is happy to see them, Lenin says at last. "It is through you we now realize this theoretical slogan, calling for the passage of all power to the Soviet Workers' and Soldier's Deputies."

The sailors are content with this, and march off to the Taurida.

He stands for a moment looking up at this little nondescript man, the crown of his head shining in the sun, the pointed beard barely eclipsing his chin, his vest buttons somewhat stressed with that resigned belly to which middle age often surrenders itself. On such ordinary shoulders do fledgling governments ride.

This is not the outbreak of February: that was a spontaneous execution of the people's will, a simultaneous exhaustion, when the struggling beast at last shudders in its traces and turns on its master. Lenin's careful tiptoeing notwithstanding, this has clearly been orchestrated by the Bolsheviks, and they do not intend a repeat of that nearly bloodless winter in which the tsar ceded three centuries of autocratic domination to the bayonets of the workers.

The sailors are dotted with small groups of army soldiers and Red Guards; they are all enclosed by armored cars which proceed slowly down the Nevsky, at a creeping human pace that keeps the men at the heart of their convoy.

In Liteinyi, shots break out; there is a sudden panic unworthy of trained men; they respond with wild shots, breaking from their formations, cowering behind the trucks, sprinting madly for those nearby buildings which might offer momentary sanctuary.

When the shooting finally lets up, they slither back cautiously, but no longer hold their formations: they carry their guns at the ready, and look with sharper eyes on the streets surrounding them.

He finishes his jar of herring, seats the hat properly on his head, puts his hands in his pockets.

At the Taurida Palace, the demonstrators are greeted by cheers from the Machine Gun Regiment; the workers swarm them. The street is elbow to elbow; and throughout the day it will remain so; the shouts for Soviet control become louder, more strident: crowds such as these are not used to waiting. Revolutionaries have waited long enough; let this puny government deny them their demands: they have already toppled one.

When the sailors arrive, they attempt what the others have not: to force their way into the palace; they cry out for the Minister of Justice, Pereverzev, to explain why their comrades have been arrested at Durnovo's villa.

A politician can accomplish little in such turbulent surroundings, and indeed when a man pops out of the building to declare that Pereverzev is not there, that he has already resigned, that he is no longer a minister of this government, that they must focus their battles elsewhere, the crowd surges for him; ministers are responsible for one another; the punishment of one is the punishment of all: such crowds are not to be reasoned with. In a mob, the individual vanishes; he is part of a collective consciousness; whatever man has wound the key in his back points him in a direction until he wants it reversed, and there he stands, shouting, maiming, killing, whatever is required of him: an evil which does not lurk in the individual breast manifests easily in the collective.

The unfortunate man escapes the mob's clutches, and is replaced by another, someone called Chernov. He is immediately assaulted and searched for weapons. He embarks on a long speech: a politician is always ready with his pen if not armed with his sword.

A fist is shaken in Chernov's face; his coat is seized; a sudden tug of war breaks out, the one side yanking him toward a waiting car, the other back toward the Taurida.

Carefully, with that sly insinuation of a man calculating the vast pendulum of such a crowd, Lenin slinks into the outskirts of it, where he will not be noticed. He stands quietly with his hands in his vest pockets while Trotsky goes to extract Chernov from the car which the sailors have at last wrestled him into.

The government won't be taken today, he decides; there is too much vacillation in Lenin. Even now he hesitates, wringing his hands over whether it's the time or not. Thousands at his back, carrying his banners, lauding his words, worshipping the unobtrusive beard, the innocently bald head, crying out for Soviet reign, for the complete transfer into the hands of the people, for the blood of the rich, who have certainly slaked themselves on that of the peasants for long enough, and oh, is it time? Is it time? Dear me, perhaps Russia isn't ripe for the taking: perhaps she needs a while more to simmer, boiling over with her indignation.

Humans are disappointing, aren't they?

* * *

He arrives in Tsarskoe Selo round nine that evening.

He laughs uproariously upon discovering Bekah combing out a little girl's hair, humming under her breath, a ribbon between her teeth.

"Shut _up_!" she snaps at him.

"Bekah, surely we've been through this enough times." He bends down to look the child eye to eye, offering her a peppermint from his pocket. "Hello, sweetheart. And what's your name? Kak vas zavoot?"

"She speaks English, Nik. Do you think I grabbed some little gypsy child off the streets? And do you always go round handing out candy to children like some kind of pervert?" She snatches the peppermint out of the girl's hands; the little demon lets up a shriek so loud that Elijah, looking quite put out, wads up a chair cushion against his ear.

"You can call me Uncle Nik."

"No, you can't," Rebekah intervenes rudely.

"My name's Vasilisa," the girl tells him. "Did you bring any cake? My new mama Bekah said there'd be some at the palace, and there isn't any here."

"I lied. You should get used to that. People do it all the time. Now hold still." Bekah snags the comb in one of the golden curls, and the girl yelps.

"You're _pulling_!"

"Well, it wouldn't hurt if you'd hold still!"

"How are the Germans?" Elijah asks wearily, removing the cushion from his ear.

"Much better than the Russians; I expect they'll pull out of the war soon. The Russians, I mean." He seats himself beside Elijah. "Is there any tea?"

" _No_ ," Rebekah says with far more emphasis than he is sure is fair or necessary.

"Tea is a delicate subject at the moment," Elijah says.

"Mama Bekah used it on one of the sentry's, how you say… _couilles_?"

"He was trying to mount me like some kind of pig." She yanks at another tangle in the long blonde hair; Vasilisa shrieks.

"Do not say ' _couilles'_ ," Elijah lectures. "It's not a word for polite company."

"And you are among the politest," he points out, spreading his hands and with an innocently cocked eyebrow gesturing to Rebekah's scowling face and his own dusty uniform with the splashes of blood here and there that no good scrubbing can entirely eradicate from the canvas.

"Mama Bekah says the Romanovs are probably all to be murdered in their beds. You think that is true, pravda, _oui_?" Vasilisa asks, locking her large blue eyes on him, and with that child's focus which for a moment can concentrate in itself all the attention of a thousand operatic fanatics, waits for his answer as Bekah at last sets aside the comb and pushes the girl off her lap.

"Probably, yes."

"Niklaus."

He leans forward in his chair. "Have you heard of the French Revolution? Marie Antoinette? They chopped off her head. Russia is just as angry with father tsar."

"Did it roll down the street?"

He laughs; Elijah rubs the bridge of his nose. "No, love; executioners are not quite so sloppy as that. But blood literally ran in the streets; you could hear it splash beneath your shoes."

Elijah passes a hand over his face, momentarily eclipsing his disappointed expression. "You've just assigned yourself to nightmare duty, Niklaus."

He lifts his hands. "Fine, fine; I'll hold the pillow over her face if she gets too out of control, hmm?" He raises the pitch of his voice, and leans toward her again, dimpling. "Would you like that, sweetheart? Would you like Uncle Nik to smother you in your sleep?" He turns toward Elijah. "Children are like dogs; it's all in the tone."

"It's not a dog, Nik!" Bekah snaps. "You could have a little compassion; she's lovely, after all. _Ow_. Don't pull my hair, you little brat! Do you want to be drowned?"

* * *

The tension between the Romanovs and their captors, like the rope stretched between two objects, subject to those mighty grindstones of time and weather, is bound, eventually, to snap.

The colonel of the unit which has been assigned to guard them is friendly enough, and retains still that lingering loyalty the child feels for his parent, that effervescent deity who shades all his days, but his enlisted men regularly harass and humiliate this gentle, retiring being called Nicholas, whom these revolutionary youths escort with jeers during his habitual exercise. With all of Russia once beneath his fingertips, the tsar is now confined to a mere park corner: he may have his little square of cultivated green, and count himself fortunate. For such scraps are the conquerors overjoyed to watch their former jailers crawl after: this ape in a crown, how meekly he asks after his daily walk, and touches his hand to the brim of his hat with that unconscious habit which still lifts his salute to a military that will never again fall to at a roar from his throat. How polished he appears each morning, in neat dress, with beard carefully trimmed, with soft voice, his children all about him, and his eyes upon his German whore as though she is still in the full snowy virginity of her youth; under such timidity did Russia cower!

Soon after his return Alexandra receives with tears and Nicholas with quiet resignation the news that England will not accept these asylum seekers: the Romanovs are to try their luck against their own people, in their own lands. Marie Antoinette's guillotine, retired for a moment by that frail savior hope, hovers once more above the tsar's neck. So wobbles a dynasty, that most brittle of all institutions: one day Mt. Olympus underfoot, the next sepulchral Midgard.

But the tides of history and fate are ever-shifting: never is the shore upon which they will ultimately foam easily foreseen. While the family still careens beneath this blow, the Provisional Government, newly strengthened by the Bolshevik's failed putsch and Lenin's unexpected hesitation, goaded by the Allies, trapped beneath that inevitable millstone of the U.S. government, prepares a new offensive.

Kerensky opens a bombardment along the Galician front; for once bolstered by those bulwarks of proper supplies and adequate ammunition, the Russians break through the Austrian front lines and spend two exultant weeks advancing: Nicholas holds exuberant _Te Deums_ in celebration.

But on July 14th the tide shifts again: the German reserves have sprung from that hallowed ground like mushrooms; the Russian advance is checked; Mother Russ's sons are thrown once more onto those Boche bayonets, whose hunger is indefatigable.

He is reading a copy of _Pravda_ one morning when a man enters the room with a sheaf of papers under his arm. The child Valeriya (Vladlena? Valentina?) is playing at his feet; she asks with an imperiousness which Bekah must be proud to attribute to her influence for the man's name, and his business.

"Eh…Anatoly," he says, looking somewhat taken aback. "Andreivich." He hands over the papers. "Lenin has made it into Finland; you must have seen that Trotsky has given himself up to the police."

"Yes." He sets aside his copy of _Pravda_ in favor of the man's offering.

"They're demonstrating in the city again. The latest military offensive has flooded the streets. Banners as far as the eye can see: "Down with the Provisional Government!" He is a good Bolshevik, a radicalized university student, and sounds perfectly ecstatic.

Rebekah throws open the door to the study, Elijah on her heels, and stops immediately upon sight of this strange man; she takes in the fair blonde hair, nearly white, the doe-like brown eyes, the sturdy shoulders; she sees in a moment a potential rival in him, and slams the door behind her. "Who's this?" she demands.

"Anatoly Andreivich," Vladlena or Valentina replies. "He's here to tell Uncle Nik about the war."

"Don't call him that."

The child stands up and skips over to stand before Elijah; she's learned this unnerves him. He immediately angles his suit away from her, and takes out his pocket square in anticipation of some sticky touch or another from this little creature.

He smiles and sets aside the papers to steeple his fingers beneath his chin. "Thank you, Tolya," he says with just enough familiarity to rankle Bekah's already stiffened fur, and raise a touch of self-conscious color in the boy's cheeks. "I'll pop round to your flat shall we say…round 6:00 this evening?" He speaks rapidly in Russian so that Bekah, far more intimately acquainted with French and pinching her nose all the while through this language of harsh consonants and strange phlegmatic hissings, cannot follow him.

Anatoly responds in kind; he knows his minions upon sight, you see. You can tell a good from a poor at a glance. Some men are quicker than others, some harsher, some soft; some hold only that dullard's spark which is barely sufficient to sustain him through the undemanding task of his breathing, and you can see this all in his eyes; the soul is but a mere sliver of what one can glimpse, should he be so privileged to understand which angle to study in this window onto the human viscera.

"Are you fucking him?" Bekah asks mere seconds after the door has clicked shut behind him.

"Bekah," Elijah warns.

"What is 'fucking'?" the girl asks.

"Do you know how mama and papa made you?"

"Niklaus."

"Papa put an egg in her stomach, like a chicken."

"That is not how human reproduction works. The female has the eggs," Elijah replies, brushing his bangs from his eyes, perhaps the better to get at the bridge of his nose.

"Let grand-mère Elijah tell you all about human reproduction. And, yes, Bekah, we're 'fucking' as you so elegantly put it. His girlfriend as well. I might need to turn them against one another one day, and compulsion just seemed so…pedestrian. Not that it was much more difficult to seduce either one of them."

"That was fast. You've been back for, what? Approximately thirty seconds?"

"I don't like what you're implying. I'm not that kind of girl," he says, dimpling from behind his fingers. "Anyway, if you're done berating me from your pedestal of utterly untarnished virtue, I think I'll head back into the city, see what the rabble is up to."

"You mean join it. That's so tacky, Nik."

"I know: revolutionary fervor; how _gauche_."

"May I come to see the rabble?" the child asks.

"Why not?" He spreads his hands with expansive generosity.

* * *

The child (whose name, he is somewhat crisply reminded, is in fact Vasilisa) is delighted by the street demonstrations. He lets her climb on the Horseman and treats her to a glass of vodka and an unobstructed view of his afternoon snack which few living humans are fortunate enough to witness: the humans missed out on a fine uncle when his mother's sorcery forever straightened his bones, if he says so himself.

At 6:00 punctually he is ushered into Anatoly's flat, and they retire, for half an hour and more, into a cloud of cigar smoke and Anatoly's unbridled opinions of these revolutionary throes in which the city thrashes. He is, like most 23-year-old university students, utterly confident in his opinions; he has accumulated four years of higher learning; he is, therefore, an authority in all and sundry. Aristotle's wisest calculations are no match; there has dribbled from no ancient pen more certainty than rolls from this dexterous tongue which has seen scarcely two decades and one war.

"What about this man called Stalin?" he interjects at one point, dabbing the ash from the end of his cigar.

"He's the one who smuggled out Lenin. Hid him for days, and then got him over the border into Finland! He'll be a wise replacement, if we have the sense to vote him in. Brilliant man. Very patriotic. Do you know he was arrested seven times between 1908 and now, and he escaped five? They just couldn't hold him. I wrote up a profile on him, just like you asked; it's in those papers I gave you this morning."

"Yes; I'm working my way through them at the moment. You've been very thorough."

He does appreciate that.

He can be very grateful, and reward proportionately.

When he leaves the flat, he is confronted by a sea of red: everywhere are those scarlet armbands, flecking the limbs of the populace like childhood moles, worn with the ease of long familiarity and rightness.

In his head he flicks the pages of the packet Anatoly has prepared for him, seeing in photographic reproduction the tight cursive, the smudges where the old nib has failed and a new been applied in its stead, the notes scribbled in each margin with neither logic nor legibility. His professors must despair of him.

But the government is all neatly laid out there, its main players amassed by rank, and broken down into categories of physical and political description; into both the Provisional Government and their Soviet successors can he peer, then, and suss their positions and their future movements for himself.

On his way back into the Alexander Palace, he pulls aside the soldier he has compelled to keep watch on his siblings, and listens to a dry recitation of that day's lethargic movements, which have consisted of little besides strolling with the royal family and watching the children play in their designated corner of the park. Elijah spent much of his time composing a letter which the soldier could not read; it was written in a language he could not name.

Rebekah, the guard tells him, has had a liaison with one of the officers. Not, he'll venture a guess, the one whose _couilles_ were so soundly discouraged.

He claps the man's shoulder, and rewards him with a smile. Too ugly for more base encouragements, but useful nevertheless, and one does not snub that, regardless of how unfortunate the jawline.

When he enters the palace, he finds the family in stitches; Alexandra lies helpless on her lavender couch, clutching her stomach; the girls have abandoned their needlework for their hilarity. That lowering cloud of doom, ever-present, black as any heraldic storm front, has lifted for a moment: the sun shines out of these faces. In their hardship they have found the reprieve of one another; they have understood, no monarch's riches are found in his gilded thrones; therefore he is deposed only from immaterial nonessentials. What he lacks in emeralds he has made up in daughters; what cities have been wrested from him are pallid Aquariuses beside his wife's Sagittarius.

He notes how brightly Elijah's eyes shine when he looks upon this family, and slips out of the room.

* * *

Moscow is, in these tumultuous days of wartime exodus, home to few true Muscovites. Everywhere in these stressed prospekts of congested trams and overflowing trains can be found that perplexing Babel of Genesis.

To fill those holes which the soldiers have left in their former manly pursuits are the city's women, driving the trams, conducting the trains, wearing the jaunty red caps of messenger boys as though there never was a time in which a woman was given her needlework and her silks and sealed carefully away in that roseate bubble of the home, where she is to be protected from all such nefarious minutiae as those horrifying levers through which she can, of _her own accord_ , stop or start those beasts of Satan which rumble seductively along their clanging tracks. How cruel is war indeed! To tell a woman, in fact you may accomplish anything you like, rivet this aeroplane, supervise that shell, knock back together the family automobile with mere grit, forgo your petticoats, don your husband's trousers, why not, the world has gone to the devil anyway, dance in the streets, dance, dance, young zhena, may your ankles relish their brutish new freedom!

The hearse he has hired in Petrograd is stymied often by the bakery lines which wind out into the streets, and the slow-moving cabs whose horses, themselves emaciated by the war, clop along wearily. During one such traffic jam, they are obliged to wait nearly twenty minutes while the tram drivers negotiate with the pedestrians by such methods as frantic bell ringing and angry shouting; the cabs stack up with resigned familiarity. He steps down to walk along the line of cabs, petting the horses, murmuring to them, feeding them out of his hand, and before one sorry old nag pausing for nearly ten minutes to scratch her ears. She must be nearly twenty, sway-backed, foul-toothed, with dull eyes and patchy coat; he kisses her muzzle. "We should have been retired years ago, now, shouldn't we, sweetheart? Hmm?" He lets her nibble at his coat pocket. Humans have, through their whole sordid histories, sewn and deservedly reaped their own fates; but a beast- a beast, if we are to crown by merits of conscience rather than birth, ought to rule any land twice as large as Russia. And yet we break her back beneath a saddle.

"Take her over to the side there and let her rest until I return," he orders the cab driver, and gives the little sweetheart a final pat on her nose before returning to his hearse.

There are singers in Moscow which carry no living blood; they are the bells of the churches. They are each of them individual vocalists; their notes vary with all the disparity of human sopranos.

With Kol at his side he climbed to the top of one of them some twenty years ago, and they sat drinking vodka and laughing with their hands over their ears as each vibration of the bell threatened to spill them off the roof of the tower. The air had significantly more bite to it then; Moscow was caught, rag-like, between those teeth of wind and snow; he remembers Kol burrowing into his side like either of them still needed the warmth.

He directs the driver to park the hearse in one of the church yards as the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer gongs its first strike, still in the infant stages of its power, warming for the full swing. You can hear an almost human throat clearing in the pause before the next strike: you will imagine precisely that: a breath caught; a note suspended in the brass throat, ripening to fullness. What object do we understand that we cannot ascribe human motives to? A bell is merely a bell until we hear its song in our bones. We cannot truly appreciate a thing that does not waken something within us, and what but flesh and blood can stir our own? The bell, then, becomes a brother's hand; we regard the bell with the same sentiment; we feel a gratefulness for it.

Only music holds such a power; wizardry like this does not exist in even his own immortal cells; imagine, to transform brass into flesh, bring wood to tears- after all, a violin's sobbing is no mere technical scraping of hair on catgut; the instrument itself is weeping. It has gained a human voice. It reaches out to touch and stimulate some hidden grief of our own.

He opens the doors of the hearse to sit in the back with Kol's coffin as the Kremlin reaches out with his sweet tenor, and Khamovniki with his dark bass.

The face inside the coffin is perfectly still; he reaches out to brush the bangs from its eyes.

He would ask, why did you do it? When a man's hate is so complete as to bring his destruction down on his own head- has he been that poor of a brother? Is there between the Niklaus of old and the Klaus of present so wide a gap? Did he never, in your mind, sit with you beneath a sheepskin spinning tales? When his present sins blot out his past kindnesses- what does he do? How does he move on from that? How does he, in that inevitable future when you awake, look into your eyes, touch your face, cobble together any legitimate reason which might open to your eyes an avenue to forgiveness? He is held together by secrets and malice now. Here is his secret: he loves. He loves, he loves. He pretends he doesn't; he lectures against it. He punishes any crumb of humanity which he sniffs up in himself and his unfortunate relations.

But if he could hold your head on his breast again.

And yet that all passes away; he has turned himself into something else now. He has given you no other conclusions to draw. He has for so long convinced yourself, himself, that inside is no longer a man, merely a void, which he feeds by way of his obsessions and his possessions. Such fires are not stoked by love; such motivations as power a thing like him do not draw their smoke from the ashes of living breasts.

Father will take everything from him; is it not better to take it from himself first?

To break one's own toys is so much more satisfying.

And so you lie, little brother, folded neatly away like the doll he has tired of.

A man's best lies are the ones he tells himself; so strike that beginning lamentation, brother dear; he was only indulging in that little human comfort of self-pity.

He knows it wasn't you that brought father down on them.

You see, Elijah is hiding something from him.

All pardons to his ego, the eldest of them is just as quick on his feet as he; their minds have been similarly honed by the centuries. There is no literature he has memorized in total that Elijah cannot also recite by heart; he has mastered no more languages, and conquered no more instruments; their scientific discoveries race neck and neck.

But Elijah is weighted by honor; worse, still, by the brother of honor, that redheaded stepchild, if you will, Illusion: a man who _imagines_ himself honorable is far more dedicated than a man who has somewhere within him a natural well of it. He clings more hardily to his ethics; his lines are simply uncrossable; the good heart, the true heart, will spy out some striations of gray at war between those simple comedies of black and white. He will thieve to save a child, and murder to protect an innocent. He is more wily than the man who paints his own aureole.

Elijah will never reach his true potential with these fetters around his ankles; he will always be outmaneuvered when his opponent has burdened himself with nothing, when he has locked this soft spot in his heart away to rot, when he has realized his error and yet leaves the falsely imprisoned in his little jail cell, his own mummified Dantes.

He listens to the last fading whispers of the bells.

He touches his brother's face, tenderly. Not all of him is a stone; there is wetness on his cheeks, after all. The bells have reached him too; the Moscow air pours somewhere into him: by such gaps do traitors like his brother dear stretch down into the guts of him. We can't cut out all the important bits of ourselves, now can we? There isn't a sword long enough; a man cannot be his own heart's jury, judge, and executioner.

But he can pretend to steel; he can shut the coffin lid on his innocent brother's sleeping face and wipe his cheeks.

He can step down onto the pavement and with authority in his voice order the driver back into the heart of the city.

He kills the cab driver on his way out of Moscow, and takes the old mare himself to the Youssupov estate, where he sets her loose in the pastures.

* * *

Prime Minister Kerensky is easily directed; he is a dictator at heart. It is easy to pour silk into his ear. And this always smoothes the way for poison: a man who has sopped up such flattery from a single source will not blink when this same source passes along a hard truth or two. He spins whole conspiracies in the man's head: imagine what might ride in on those Bolshevik coattails. While the one hand is occupied with these usurpers, what is the other doing? The conservatives are creeping in on his blind spot; he has tied the one hand behind his back by watching always for Bolshevik villains and not monarchist revivals.

On August 13, following the tsarevich's thirteenth birthday, the Romanovs are packed up hastily and in utmost secrecy placed on a train to a small village in Siberia.

Elijah leaves with them.

* * *

He moves himself, Bekah, and the child into the Winter Palace where Kerensky has established himself.

Kerensky, exhausted, works with one eye over his shoulder, hunching for long nights against the desk of Alexander III, rifling his papers and wetting his pen nib with the jittery persistence of an insomniac- what an ugly cycle, isn't it, to watch a man slowly break down from something so simple.

We can't have that, now can we? What kind of man would he be, to sit indifferently by and ignore such a cry for help, to merely watch the shaking hands, the paranoid eyes, the poor benumbed mind, slipping further and further into idle paranoia day after day?

Still buried in the bottom of his rucksack are several packets of cocaine which he has pinched from various enlisted men; he takes them out one night when Kerensky is muttering over his desk, and slips them unobtrusively onto a stack of documents; one doesn't flaunt these things. You've got to ease someone into it; the overt offer is snubbed, the covert welcomed. A man always trusts something more when it isn't crammed down his throat.

"What's this?" Kerensky demands.

"Just a little something to help your concentration. Taken in conjunction with your opium, it ought to sharpen everything a bit. For those long nights when you can't sleep and the government is weighing on your shoulders." He smiles and pats one of the nervous hands.

"Where did you get this?"

He clasps his hands behind his back and smiles with all the charm he can muster; you may be sure the man sways a bit in his chair, in such an unprotected environment as this, with nothing but the lamp between them.

"I was a doctor in the war."

He may be excused for this inconsequential white lie; the truth is far more impressive, of course. But there is something to be said for humbleness in the presence of such a man; he likes the worm better than the peacock. After all, he doesn't want to brag, mate, but thanks to an 11th century famine in Egypt and yours truly, you are now aware that those hallowed writings of Galen erred in their findings of the jaw bone, that it is comprised of one bone rather than two; you might thank him for that. And did he bend his back for long hours over those dissections of the Middle Ages to see such doubt in these glib 20th century eyes which hold all answers, hmm? Did those reluctant souls who screamed long into the night sacrifice in vain at the altar of modern medicine? He thinks they were quite ungrateful enough for his efforts in the progression of anatomical research without you heaping scorn on his advice.

* * *

In the beginning, Bekah totes the girl about like any new and shiny accessory.

Like most of her toys, there is a sudden and direct correlation between her loss of interest and the realization that small humans are noisy, bothersome creatures who usurp time better spent on herself.

"Well, this is a stunning blow," he says to Elijah, who is in the city for a few days. "Who could have ever predicted this?" He spreads his hands. "Perhaps I should undagger Kol? Let him play with the mite for a few minutes; you'll be rid of her in a moment."

Elijah rubs his eyes. "Rebekah, we have spoken of this. It's time for you to learn some responsibility."

"I've been perfectly responsible, Elijah. Is she dead? Has her hair gone to ruin? Is her complexion not twice as good as when I first took her in?"

Elijah flips his bangs out of his eyes with studied patience. "Either take it with you during the day, or get rid of it. You cannot expect your brother to look after it; Niklaus did not kidnap it."

"And we all have to be responsible for our own abductions," he puts in, sitting back in his chair and folding his hands on his knee. Bekah gives him a sour look. He raises an eyebrow at her, with the faux innocence that has snagged many an unwary human.

"Yes, Elijah, I'll bring her along to Marya's, shall I? I'm sure you'd approve of that."

"Who is Marya?" Vasilisa asks, touching Elijah's elbow. He picks her hand carefully off himself, and dusts down his suit sleeve.

"Your new mother is a lesbian; Marya is her lover."

"Niklaus."

"What? Perhaps she'll be a lesbian herself one day, brother." He unfolds his hands and leans forward, lowering his voice to that intimate timbre in which the best of teachers address their lectures. "You see, Vasilisa, when adults want to practice putting a chicken in the woman's belly, they make a noise like this." He clasps his hands and squishes both palms rapidly against one another; Elijah suffers three minor coronary events. "That is what Bekah is doing, only with another woman. And sometimes men do this as well, with one another, when they have no women or when they've had ones like Bekah."

"Shut up, Nik."

Elijah sighs for a dramatically long time. "I need to post a letter. This will have been sorted by the time I've returned." He gives Bekah a father's disciplinary look. "Won't it?"

"I doubt it."

"Shut _up_ , Nik."

"And who are we sneaking off to, love letter in hand? Anyone I know?" He lets the girl climb up onto his lap; she tugs on his shirt collar and fingers one of its bloodstains.

"What's this?"

"It was lunch, sweetheart." He rests his chin on her head and looks up at Elijah from beneath his lashes.

"You recall John?" Elijah asks.

He smiles. "Of course. Give him my love."

"I think you've given him quite enough on your own," Elijah replies dryly, adjusting his cuffs.

"There's no need to be jealous; I have it on good authority he just prefers blondes."

Bekah snatches the girl off his lap. She always did hate it when her little pets preferred him; he recalls one unfortunate lap dog that exercised excellent judgement and took to him immediately, poor thing. "Have you been feeding her, Nik?"

"No. Of course not," he says, sharing an unconcealed look with the girl, who winks.

"Well, stop it, you prat; she'll get fat."

"I'll just pinch a bit of cocaine from our friend Kerensky, then. Enough and she'll run it off immediately. Or die." He shrugs.

"When mama Bekah goes to be a lesbian, I can stay with Uncle Nik. He doesn't mind," Vasilisa tells Elijah, who eyes her in the same manner he reserves for cockroaches and men who do not alphabetize their closets.

"That's true. In fact, I've been told I'd make an excellent governess."

"By who, exactly, you twit? An asylum patient?"

"They are people too, Bekah. Anyway, Elijah, you better run along with that letter. We wouldn't want to keep John waiting, now would we?"

* * *

He has the letter intercepted, of course. It is carefully steamed open, the contents copied, and then the seal reproduced in such a manner that the tampering is utterly invisible.

There appears to be no subterfuge in it; he'll need a different route, then. Back to 1915, to father's untimely arrival, to all the little threads which must still be dangling. He packs Anatoly off to New Orleans to sniff them out.

Before Elijah he flaunts all these hints which will stiffen his spine a bit, put that first spark of suspicion in him, crawl slowly down the spine those fingers of premonition. It wouldn't do, of course, to accuse him outright; and, anyway, what is the cat who promptly eats his victim rather than batting it about for a bit?

He makes several pilgrimages out to Tobolsk, where the royal family lives quietly in the governor's mansion and is the daily fascination of this small town; he plays soldiers with the small tsarevich, now in the full bloom of rare health; with the deposed tsar he discusses religion and Dostoyevsky; and round his brother he constantly prowls, with here and there a prod which he subverts with an innocent smile.

The girl he takes about Petrograd in that perpetual summer of the White Lights, which no melancholy cloud dare touch; the sky blazes as some electrically lit mansion till the early hours; the Neva yearns for her touch of moonlight: there is no river night cannot improve.

He sneaks away to those furtive Bolshevik meetings from which he will tail first Trotsky, and then Stalin: these men are the future of their party; the trick is to see toward whom the pendulum is weighted.

Trotsky is the greater orator of them; superior to Lenin, able to mix into his tirades those personal touches which reach out from the speech of the intellectual to grab the common man by his throat. Trotsky, then, will take his place first on the stage of history, he'll wager, and sets about ingratiating himself with the man.

* * *

So he passes August, and September. There's that Kornilov rubbish, of course, but it's hardly worth mentioning: while Petrograd is fortified against the general's troops, they are intercepted and persuaded to lay down arms before even entering the city.

Bekah dances a new role called 'Sheherazade' in a plumed white headdress.

The theatres lose their shine; the spectators are comprised more and more of uniformed soldiers in various stages of distress. The heavy royal curtains are removed, those marvels of velvet and brocade; gone are the glitters of those crowns which the lights made merry on.

If you, like he, oh great nobles, who thought your gold a shield, had stood in the deluge of revolutionary France and watched the palaces shelter not a woman and the gardens hide no child, if you like he had stomped about in that merry flirtation of the Allemande, touching those fair silken hands of ladies who later would kneel crying before the guillotine.

But history is a warning never heeded. History is a thing to be sneered at: x y z led to the downfall of Historical Person A; x y z is not replicable _here._ Here the people are less barbaric; here there is no lurking monster of yesteryear, which rears up from men to eat sheep, gilded though they may be.

Nevertheless.

The revolution stretches beyond the capital; the peasants murder their landlords, sack their mansions, uproot and slaughter whole families; Tolstoy's own widow and children crouch breathlessly in the dark of their manor, waiting for that nonchalant hand of fate to prove herself benign or malignant, to hurry the mob past their doors or to hurl them straight through the windows.

He likes to sit and watch them.

Humans are funny.

Violence is a terror, a scourge, an indignity when mankind feels its knife at his own throat; and yet he is always justified in turning it on his neighbor. If they killed all the sheep, it would be a _cull lambity_ , and yet see what they do to one another.

Lenin, still in Finland, begins to send a flurry of letters to the Central Committee, demanding an armed uprising; he rather thinks he might need to revise his opinion of the bloke. Such dramatic superciliousness and bloodlust: 'It would be naïve to wait for a "formal" majority for the Bolsheviks. No revolution ever waits for _that_ …History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now.'

As if history forgives any man.

* * *

In October, Lenin, newly returned from Finland, calls a secret meeting at the house -sweet, ungentle irony, what a blow you deliver- of a Menshevik called Nikolai Sukhanov, whose Bolshevik wife pertly informs him he need not return from the office that evening.

Late, in a wig for which he has forgotten the powder, so that it keeps slipping to reveal a flash of the bald crown, Lenin, with only twelve of the twenty-one members of the Central Committee, swings the vote for armed insurrection ten to two in his favor.

And in pencil, on a fragment of paper torn from a child's notebook, he officially recognizes 'that an armed uprising is inevitable, and the time for it fully ripe'; the clock chimes some hour in that fuzzy dreamland of human insomnia, those morning hours of beggar dogs and ruined men.

Afterward, he goes to sit with his brother for a while.

Sometimes we feel within us a certainty which we cannot comprehend. The dictionary might name it foreboding, but there is no true word for it in any language. There is simply a black cloud within you. The stomach has been transformed to a stone. Every limb has some portentous weight. This is when the future cannot be foreseen; when a feeling is forever. Sadness is temporary; an irritable morning is overturned by a merry afternoon; and so too is happiness supplanted by a tragedy. But nothing penetrates this murk; there is simply the cloud, the stone, the limbs with their invisible chains. There is no far shore onto which he will emerge from this miasma.

He rests his hand for a moment on the pommel of the dagger.

Is it the cyclical nature of mankind which produces this despair? If we did not run constantly on our wheels digging ruts with our choices, if we were to veer, suddenly, wildly, from the path, would that not lift the cloud, liquefy the stone, crush the chains?

If he- if he were to turn his back on Elijah's mystery transgressions, to undagger his brother, to forget his revenge, to forget his reputation, to acknowledge to himself, after all, 'Klaus' has not eclipsed 'Nik', if he were to leap the tracks, to stop rolling along century after century, collecting power as a boulder accrues moss, to stop seeing himself as two sides of a coin, the one side the man, the other the monster, to forgive himself for being both, to stop flipping it uncompromisingly back to the monstrous face when it has landed on 'man'-

But do you know, brother, he is a coward. He has done what any powerful man has done, he has forgotten how to forgive. He has not faced the things of which he is afraid, he has tried to cut them out.

He releases the dagger.

* * *

On October 25th, when he storms the Winter Palace at the head of Bolshevik forces, he is dressed like a gentleman. There is no hint of turbulence on his face. He steps into the light which blazes from all the windows of the palace and for a moment pauses: such events demand a pose or two. At his back, the men have cleared the firewood barricades, their blood is on fire, they are disgruntled workers, they are the soldiers who have given up; they have kneeled in the mud for too long, eating German bullets. They have kneeled for this regime, for that regime; they have done wearing out their trousers in obeisance.

The doors on either side of the gateway are open, spilling the electric lights onto the lawn; they are broken to bits by the men's boots; their shadows mount the first assault, on the great shining surface of the palace; the men follow after.

The few defenders who have been shot during that breathless rush through the Red Arch are easily vaulted over; adrenaline carries them over the abandoned rifles of the paltry defense party and into the cellar of the east wing, where the men fall on the packing crates in that orgy of wartime looting; he walks past it all, back out into the night, where the shouts of, "Comrades! Don't touch anything! Don't take anything! This is the Property of the People!" trail after him into the west wing.

Into this mighty bastion of royal supremacy the army pours, pours, jostling among themselves, seizing the terrified servants, but a Red Guard checks them loudly: "Clear the palace! Everybody out of the palace except the Commissars, until we get sentries posted."

Some semblance of order begins to appear: he walks past numerous sentries who demand a pass which he compels them to believe they have already seen. Beneath him the ground shivers; the windows rattle with the thunder of a shot from the _Aurora_ ; he jogs lightly up a staircase, that marvel of gold trimming and white marble, soaring on forever into these labyrinth halls, overhead the chandeliers trembling, and the servants in their livery nervously prompting him away from rooms he is 'forbidden' to enter.

Humans do not understand: nothing is forbidden. No depravity, no ill thought, no murderous act upon the sweetest of innocents.

And, anyway, who has the gun here, sweetheart?

He shoots one of them in the head, and grabs the other by the collar. "Where is the Provisional Government?"

She bursts into tears and feeds him a slew of garbled Russian. Excuses, excuses, love. But aloud he says to this young babe perhaps scarcely into her twenties, do not be afraid, little one, there now, and smashes her head against the banister.

A burst of rifle fire erupts in one of the rooms below as he ascends the next level; there are various scattered thunderstorms here and there, several loud rat-a-tats and then silence. A single defender discharges his own resistance when he pokes his head into one of the rooms; he allows the bullet to pierce his shoulder, and looks down at it for a moment.

"You've ruined my dinner jacket," he tells the man, and kneecaps him. He does enjoy that one; perfect for any dissenter who considers himself above kneeling to his betters, and scarce is the agony which can hold a candle to it.

"Now, mate," he says, crouching in front of the man. "Stop screaming; I'm trying to have a conversation with you. There we are. Remember, lad: manners matter. There's a lesson you can take with you anywhere. Now. You wouldn't happen to know where I could find the Provisional Government, hmm? Normally I'd just sniff them out myself, but this is more fun. Bit more dramatic, wouldn't you say?" He grabs the boy by the front of his shirt as he collapses against the divan behind him. "Catherine the Great once sat there, mate; don't ruin it. I don't know if you've noticed this, but you're bleeding at a rather alarming rate. I could help you with that. If I were properly persuaded. I like chocolates and compliments." He dimples.

"I don't know," the boy wheezes.

He takes the young unbearded cheeks between both hands; there is no greater intimacy than touching someone's face. To look them eye to eye, to press the noses together, let the foreheads gently hold one another up- caress the cheekbones and see if he can bear to lie to you, when there is such tenderness in your fingers. Brush the hair from his ears. You see, his mother has not touched him like so in many years; he remembers this, though. He remembers how the hands were always gentle. He remembers she could tell you of those uncontaminated storybook loves with nothing but her fingers.

"Do you want to change your answer?"

"I don't know," the boy says, more calmly, though in his voice there is still the strain of his wound. "They've moved."

"And you've no idea where they've gone?"

"No. All I know is that they're still in the palace."

"Thank you," he tells the boy, with such sincerity you can observe in his eyes that he sees his own survival, it hangs within plucking reach, he will see his mother, his child, his lover once more; perhaps as a cripple, but such clouds rarely blot the sun of a man's renewed survival instincts.

He grabs the boy by the throat and swings him round to intercept the bullet one of his comrades fires into the room; he gags wildly; it's well-placed, right through his throat. "You know, I do love that portrait of empress Elizabeth. I'm sorry, mate. I couldn't let your friend there shoot it."

He drops the body.

"Run," he tells the solider standing now petrified in the doorway.

And so he does. "This old thing," he says to the man when he catches up to him, two staircases later. He gestures to his face. "I'm flattered it produces such a reaction. Do you know, some people tell me I look like an angel? I think it's the curls; anyway. As you've no doubt already guessed, they were mistaken." He disembowels the man with a yank.

Politicians have a rather distinct bleating.

Imagine a long-winded novel, whose author does not know when to sit back and leave his reader to his own conjectures. Give it a voice (he suggests Proust's, with which you may not be familiar, but he can assure you there does not exist a higher-pitched mosquito whinge in all of eternity), and you can imagine why he stops, and swivels slowly to the door on his right, calmly reloading his revolver, as the best of men may be tempted to arm himself when a debate rages overlong.

Once, in the House of Lords- anyway, he won't pester you with those agonies of insecurity which can be the only progeny of his recollections.

He licks his finger and wets a stray curl; his collar he adjusts neatly, and the bullet hole in his shoulder is obscured as well as he can make it by rearranging the folds of his sleeve.

He sets his palms on the door handles and clears his throat.

Pause for admiration; you must give these moments their proper weight. And think how fantastic he must look: a bit rakish, he imagines. He wishes he had a hat to cock a bit off-center. Hindsight, the impudent slut.

He flings the doors wide.

"Good evening, gentlemen," he calls out, standing where the light flatters him best. "My name is Klaus."

* * *

She isn't entirely pleased by this eternal round of political fisticuffs.

For instance: it's been three days since anyone's noticed her hair.

In the palace it's some chatter about the Soviets and on the streets there is still the war to contend with; every generation feels their dead soldiers to be the most important, she supposes.

She's got tired of Marya and the chicken hut for the moment; you can only watch so many flies dash themselves against the web. She lies about the palace rereading _Les Liaisons dangereuses_ and sipping at the fresh lemon water she has the servants carry in at regular intervals, her couch pulled up to the window so that she can bask in summer's last jewels, or whatever rot it is Nik goes on about when he stands facing the fading sun so that the rays pick out the little threads of red in his hair.

He's worrying away at some problem or another; he's had a slab of Italian marble brought to the palace, and enrages her day and night by chipping away at the bloody thing. It's not his favorite art form; he prefers his sketchpad, but when he's turning something over in his mind, when he has a thing he needs to chew at for a bit, revealing it piecemeal, then for days he locks himself away in his studio and chisels away until this cold clay has produced that alchemical wonder of the stone hand or the flimsy veil. You could touch the cheek of any of Nik's sculptures, and expect at any moment a maidenly blush for such an impropriety.

She naps and reads her book and sips her lemon water to the incessant _tink tink tink tink_ of that chisel.

There is a steady flurry of phone calls and telegrams for Nik; she listens in to the calls, of course, and pokes about the telegrams, but they're all gibberish: he's clearly encoded them. He's quite rude like that.

She copies several of the telegrams and reclines on her couch with a pencil and fresh sheet of paper.

"Who have you sent to New Orleans, and what exactly is it that they've found?" she asks him during a rare appearance.

He pauses.

His eyes flick down to the cipher she's worked out in exquisite penmanship on the little sheet of scented stationary she folds her hands over. She smiles up at him with as much satisfaction as he has ever injected into the smarmiest of his dimples.

"Are your novels giving you ideas again, Bekah? You know they produce hysterics in women."

"I'm just beautiful, not brainless, you lying assface," she tells him.

"I know, sweetheart. That's why I had the telegrams encoded in the first place." He leans in and taps the bridge of her nose with the tip of his finger.

She tries to bite him.

She _hates_ it when he does that, the stupid, condescending _ass_.

* * *

Some afternoons she likes to dress the girl in outfit after outfit, and have her spin about with the long blonde hair flying. When they walk along the river, even those preoccupied with their bit of wartime muck stare; any gentleman worthy of his hat doffs it in their presence.

Nik's telegrams and calls dry up; or are moved elsewhere, anyway, so her lovely eyes cannot spy them.

Autumn knocks patiently at their windows, till winter steps in to take his place and bang madly at the panes.

She spends these gray afternoons practicing her solos in one of the ballrooms. The floor, still polished by the hands of those confused and lurking liveries, watches the trail of chalk she leaves over its surface. The phonograph shouts morosely into the corners: there's a certain resentment in any music playing to a room such as this. Ghosts thaw from these walls; they are shaken down with the dust and wander about in the sunbeams.

Sometimes she stops to stand in the thunderous silence of all these absent Romanovs.

"Empress Elizabeth used to host great balls here," Nik tells her one afternoon. "On Tuesdays, the women had to dress as men, and the men as women. Catherine was caught underneath the skirt of one unfortunate duke, who couldn't manage his hoops nearly as well as Kol." He smiles when he says it.

He doesn't show his dimples, but he smiles.

She hears the maddening chisel more and more; his conundrum has expanded, or, just scarcely grasped, has slipped beyond his fingers.

* * *

The girl has lovely manners, thanks to her timely intervention; she takes her to restaurants, to operas, to those few shops which still cater to the privileged minority. Vasilisa tries to compel the waiters for heavier cake, with the perfect sledge dusting of sugar on top; it's rather adorable, for a brat.

When she is prettiest, with the ribbons perfect in her hair, and the dress sash snugged round her tiny waist, Vasilisa is rewarded. They play duets at the piano and sneak Nik's candy stash and, once, they slide from floor to floor along those long gilt banisters, and at the bottom attend to their hair.

Some nights, Nik sets down his chisel.

He lays his head in her lap and shuts his eyes, but he doesn't sleep; his eyes are ever moving. He never slept much. Father's shadow has always stood over him in the dark.

She wants to hold him as she used to, like the whole world was something for her to keep at bay. Nik's the thing you have to prod back with your toe now, but when they're lying like this, she with her book put off to one side, and her feet dangling over the divan so he doesn't have her knees to contend with, and Nik so young, lost, troubled, it's like she never lost him. You must have experienced this somewhere in your youth, when it feels like a heart is a thing you can spill. This will vanish when Nik opens his eyes and swings his legs over the divan to return to his sculpture: a heart doesn't hang about long. It cannot be sustained on a few chipped old memories. Perhaps when they are fresh, they tremble at everything, but an old heart, a well-used heart, cannot quiver at every flight or fancy. They don't have that sort of spryness anymore, when their bones are like spring and the world bursts in them.

January buries ancient December; 1917 is forever put to sleep beneath frost dust and bread lines. That interminable war is still rumbling on somewhere, murdering the tastiest of her victims. It's a shame they always dash the young ones at one another; why not throw in a grandfather or two? They're so dry; you might as well make a meal of some dusty old vellum.

Nik's sculpture stares at her from his workroom. It has stepped from the cold stone straight into the world: some people are not so decisively alive. She touches the delicate fingers, and looks into the startled eyes. She feels for the girl: to live till the cheeks are just in their first ripeness, to be encapsulated like that- you'll think it's the best time to die, when Time's cruel stamp has missed your brow. It isn't. You can tart out your prison with any glitter you like; it's still a prison.

She's being gloomy, of course.

Who survives a Russian winter in good spirits?

There is no wind more damned, and no sky more leaden, than here in this corner of the world. When a Russian winter cries at your window, when it howls in your bones, when with one gusty blow Father Frost ices the Neva, and cracks half the streetlamps, one sees there is no sun, there is no peace, there is one white canvas, and no painter ever before it. You could rot in that kind of blank despair. In these sad snows nothing lives; the far-off gingerbread houses with their buttery lights spilling out onto the sidewalks are the fantasies of the demented.

Even the girl begins to act strangely; she starts bringing stray kittens back to the palace. She likes to nurse them with a bottle of milk she's found somewhere, and dress them in the outfits she strips from her dolls. They are paraded about under her arm for days; she shows them to Nik, to the guards, to the servants wandering the halls.

When she has done shuttling the things about, she kills them with a methodical sort of glee.

Nik squats down in front of her one day. "Love," he says, and smiles charmingly; for a moment she thinks he might kill the girl. "We do not hurt animals; there's a good girl. When the storm lets up, we'll pop out and find something else for you to occupy yourself with. How does that sound?"

"Ok, Uncle Nik," the brat agrees; their pets have always taken better to him, the little stunted bloody idiots.

Next day, she returns with a boy.

* * *

"I do believe you're a bad influence on her, Bekah," Nik tells her, tsking and looking down at the little mangled body in the ballroom where she likes to practice. The boy's blood has spread inconveniently far; how is she supposed to practice in this mess?

" _I_ take her out to restaurants and the opera," she snaps. "She didn't pick up any bad manners from _me_. Now clean this up."

"I'll help her bury it; one should always dispose of their own first kill. But the floor is your concern. _I_ don't want to dance on it." He gives her a smug smile.

She tries to punch it off his face, but he's always been just a smidge too quick for her; he has the audacity to kiss her hand when he dodges, and walks out of the ballroom with both hands in his pockets, whistling.

* * *

January has nearly finished when there is a second boy.

" _Nik_!" she screeches, and stomps into his workroom.

He's sitting before that bloody sculpture with his fingers steepled, his nose resting on them. He doesn't look at her. He simply studies the sculpture, leaning into his fingers, all his hair ruffed up on one side, as though he's put his hand through it again and again and has not the presence of mind to smooth it back again.

The wind outside is not so cold as what ices your spine when he looks like this, when all knowledge is coiled within him, and he's turning it about in his head, trying to decide what to do with it. He is statuesque himself; you cannot see his chest move. His eyes do not tremble beneath the lids. All that is human in him retreats to his cheeks, where there is just a faint colour. You can't touch something like this; there's no reflection. Everyone, in looking to understand himself, seeks out his own face in others: but on Nik there is nothing. He isn't just inhuman: he was never human.

"Nik," she says, more quietly this time, clutching the doorway, crunching the frame beneath her fingers, and he doesn't move, he doesn't move, but she must, she feels the flight already in her feet, and the gown tight about her breast, down down down her spine dance those tiny needles of omen, and for a moment her feet, stringless now, sovereign, retreat one after another-

And he blinks and the steepled fingers slide away, snagging for just a moment on his lip, and because Mother Nature is a cheeky git (or perhaps because he controls her), the wind sinks suddenly, and slinks away to pry at other windows.

She stands in complete silence for a moment.

He sits back in his chair and stares up at her, waiting for her tongue to loosen.

"The brat's gone and offed another one," she tells him at last.

He folds his hands in his lap, and lifts an eyebrow. "Well. I do hope her technique has improved at least. Just between you and me, the last one was a bit sloppy."

* * *

On a Thursday morning in February, Nik, in black frock coat and one of those ridiculous Cossack hats, steps onto the bank of the Neva.

He watches the girl drown her third victim.

"Uncle Nik!" she screams in delight, and shows him the marks in the dirt where the boy has kicked with long and satisfactory desperation, trying to dig himself a foothold.

There's a gun in his pocket; she can smell the metal. He likes to carry one sometimes; it makes him feel more connected to these facile human masses around him, susceptible to such a thing. He needs that sometimes, Nik; what artist who doesn't walk in mortality's monolith shadow has something to dig for? What else is there, Bekah, if not death, he asked her once; every man is only whiling away at his hobbies till he cannot hold the door against it anymore. Every masterpiece is about that mortal injustice; an artist may either run from it or embrace it, but he cannot escape it; and his admirers expect nothing less. He must hold all the answers, and work out for his rapt audience that most wily conundrum of them all.

"We're going to Tobolsk," he says to her, and shoots the girl in the back of the head.

The gunshot is bounced from bank to bank; the Neva calls to the distant pedestrians milling round the shops and hovering about the bakery lines.

But who in this city even notices such a very small death?

* * *

On Freedom Street, half a verst down, in a manor called the Freedom House, there live a man, his wife, and their five children. They are not a happy family; but then they are not an _un_ happy family.

You can say that about so few families these days, can't you?

The girls, shaved after a bout with measles, are growing their hair out nicely. The youngest one can now boast of a curl or two grazing those sleek and powdered shoulders which, perfumed no more, are still well-tended. Captivity is no reason to let one's shoulders deteriorate.

The boy likes to ride on his father's shoulders. You can see how he steers those soft brown strands in which a crown used to nest, kicking about with his heels. The soldiers, softened by these familial displays, are defeated, as men so often are, by those sudden reveals of humanity in an enemy who after all breathes just the same as him, loves his children, pines after his wife, struts about on his two legs which have been inserted one after another into his trousers. They set aside their rifles. They clamber about in the snow, tossing bits of ice and snowballs at the boy whose illness has not often allowed him these moments.

Russia's former tsar, her almighty God, father to all these snowy wastes, and the children they birth, tears his coat under a pile of playful young riflemen.

The empress is often laid up by her bones' various complaints, and in peaceful repose sits as upright as that young cynosure of yesteryear, patching her husband's socks. She always has the couch placed before the window, so she can watch what family isn't keeping her company.

Thank God we are together and saved, the tsar writes in his diary.

Thank God, thank God, he must think, scrambling about with his son, and laughingly dunking him in a snow bank.

He stands watching from the window with the empress as Elijah carefully turns up his shirt sleeves and begins pelting the tsarevich with snowballs.

Thank God we are saved, and together.

* * *

Rebekah is still somewhat put out with him over the death of Vasilisa; of course he couldn't let a child murderer trail about after them in a town like this: Petrograd won't even notice the deaths of those two boys; Tobolsk will. There's no sense leaving tales of a family in company of an abnormally bloodthirsty child for Mikael to sniff out.

On a business trip to Petrograd he nips over to Moscow and through the crafty combination of dimples, theft, and one regrettable murder (that tailor was irreplaceable; shame), he procures a dress of blue silk. It's like nothing she's seen since this war has started, and she immediately leaps up from her chair upon seeing him with it draped over his arm.

"Nik!" she breathes with a lovely smile, holding it up to her shoulders. The skirt foams all the way down to her feet; cunningly placed lace break these folds like whitecaps; the neckline plunges to a scandalous rest mid-breast. Rebekah always did like to push her fashion a bit, to shake those moldy matrons right out of their pillowy ease. Give the old bitches something to natter about.

"How did you even get hold of the silk for this?" she asks, swirling once so she can listen to it rustle.

"I called in a few favors. Do you like it?" he asks, sitting down to enjoy her fussing over it.

"I hate it," she tells him. "I'm only mooning over it to lull you into a false sense of security so that when you're not looking I can strangle you with it and leave you to leak all over it. It's nothing less than either of you deserve." She pats his cheek.

He will not allow this into the history books, but he enjoys making them smile. It's all fine and well to humanize Genghis Khan; he no longer has to answer for his kindnesses. He will be reported on as something different: deaf-hearted, stone-eyed. No soft plea ever penetrated this creature. Whatever is both man-like and inhuman frightens everyone, and isn't that most important, Father? No one is respected for his tenderness. Men remember murders, not pardons.

* * *

Nicholas Romanov is graying, soft-spoken, blue-eyed; he is not, as his detractors may enjoy deluding themselves, stupid.

History will not remember this; his conquerors, after all, are writing the texts as we speak: somewhere you can hear them trumpeting their outrage. Nicholas II will be another Genghis Khan himself by the time they are finished.

He has a precisely arranged writing desk, on which are a few pencils, some examples of his extensive watch collection, and the diary. He reads to his wife and children every night; when his wife's aches are too great, he carries her to their bed. His son is his great joy, cripple or no; his daughters are for him more hallowed than any precious jewel he had to forfeit in Petrograd. Without their crowns, without their palaces, cramped into this small home, presided over constantly by armed guardsmen, limited to stretching their legs over a couple of street blocks when once the entirety of Russia lay before them, they do not deteriorate. Monotony presses its languid hand to their brows; time, here so heavy, sprouts a few more snowy strands from the empresses' temples. Sometimes their days pass as through molasses. If he were to tell the tsar, I am 918, the tsar would reply, yes, of course, I understand.

But their children are pink, glowing; they keep up their language practice among themselves and the few servants who have clung like loyal burrs all throughout this ordeal. Alexei has had no hemophiliac attacks in ages. Every prisoner who looks through his bars and can still view the sun says to himself, soon, soon: you see the prison is not forever; it has boundaries. There is still a sky; she is blue. If spring is still sleeping somewhere beneath these endless Russian snows, it too will escape one day: you can already see hints of new growth here and there.

The empress and her beloved Nicky are playing cards one night, with helpful interventions from the children, who are each of them helping their parents cheat- Tatiana and Anastasia their mother, Alexei, Maria, and Olga their father. Elijah watches this with a sort of hunger he feels in himself sometimes, and instantly stamps down. It is not a useful hunger.

"This was our family, Niklaus," he says softly at last, low enough that the Romanovs cannot hear him.

"Yes," he says, and this, at least, is not a calculation. It was so long ago. He's lived so many lives. Oh Kol: you could never have survived them all, little brother.

"That was a very long time ago, Elijah." He continues to watch the Romanovs, who are speaking now in French, now in Russian, with poor beleaguered Alix trying to keep up. "Before we let our egos run rampant. Before we told ourselves: power above all."

Elijah looks over at him.

There is something like fondness on Elijah's face: he no longer recognizes that particular expression very well.

But his brother touches his hand.

He cups the cool palm over his knuckles. He squeezes with such warmth, with such a sudden outburst of joy, when something is not merely dislodged from your heart, but ripped free-

"Is that a note of self-reflection I hear in your voice, Niklaus?" Elijah asks him, with a gentle sarcasm that hides his hope.

He smiles without turning his head; if his brother does not detect the trembling in his hand, he will see it in his eyes. A sickness like this may originate in the heart, that secret organ where the bitterest longings may be protected, but the eyes are man's great betrayer.

Of course not; what good has an attack of conscience ever done a man? And anyway: he was talking about you, dear brother.

* * *

In April the newspapers are agog with the announcement that 'Nicholas the Bloody' is to be brought to Moscow and there tried by the Soviet government.

"It's a feint," he assures Elijah. "Lenin wants the family removed from Russia. He's worried about monarchist sympathies; there are rumors of a possible plot to return the tsar to his throne. It's safer for the Bolsheviks to exile the family completely; a trial may stir up pity and remind the people that if Nicholas was no great leader, neither is he the crumbling Bolshevik party, scratching its own back with one hand and with the other knifing it through the spine."

He lets nothing playful poke through this time, nothing for Elijah to wonder at, nothing for him to chew over: this time he lies so smoothly even his brother believes him.

Rebekah has for some time been complaining of her exile to this little backwater full of churches and staring peasants. Day by day, he allows his accelerating irritation to show through in patches, escalating till at last he snaps at her one afternoon: "Why don't you go back to bloody Petrograd, then?"

"Because you'll dagger me, you prat."

"Let her go," Elijah urges. "She has a new season to prepare for anyway."

"And it isn't as though you won't have me followed, Nik," Bekah adds peevishly, throwing herself into a chair. "What do you need me here for anyway? I'm tired of watching that idiot simper over his dried-up old wife."

"You're only tired of it because no one simpers over you that way."

"Simply because I won't let them. Who, exactly, would I want slobbering after me in this ugly little village?"

"I'm sure your consent is the only barricade, of course, sister."

"Shut up, Nik."

"Both of you," Elijah warns; such is his irritation that he does not bother to tend to the grammatical coherency of that statement. He has been picking at Bekah for days now, subtly, of course, nothing he wouldn't normally poke at, so that her own frustration is roused, and her grumbling triples, and informs his own retorts: carefully, carefully, you have to nurse these things along. Too much pressure, and she'll catch him out. If he caves too quickly, both their suspicions will be raised.

"Fine!" he finally acquiesces three hours later, throwing up his hands. They have been picking at one another the entire time; Elijah has threatened to shoot himself twice already. "But no more little mini-mes, hmm? Father could be anywhere; we don't want to leave a trail of murderous vampire children for him to follow. Return to your lesbianism and your ballet. It's the simple things that keep us out of trouble, Bekah."

"Don't condescend to me."

"How else would you recognize my voice?" he asks, and winks at her. She somewhat thaws toward him. Perhaps he'll get her another dress in Moscow.

He'll need a new tailor, of course.

* * *

Unsurprisingly, it is he who has whispered in Lenin's ear of a monarchist plot.

He is quite a close friend of the family; they speak freely in his presence. Nicholas, he assures Lenin, is chafing at his bit. He wants his crown back. He means to escape the stifling little Freedom House and with the aid of his loyal Uralites seize his throne from those sticky Bolshevik fingers.

The Bolsheviks are scuffling among themselves. The people are wavering. The war is still ongoing. Is Lenin not, as a political leader, required to show the sort of power Nicholas could never wield, does he not need to strike a decisive blow- does he not have an obligation to show his enemies and remind his allies, here is a Party to be contended with?

He could, obviously, take the whole family out back and shoot them himself: the little tsar with his lamblike eyes, the tsarina in her wheelchair, the pretty young girls, the mischievous boy, who with the bravery of a man battles his hemophilia.

But it's so much more fun this way, isn't it?

* * *

For a government to cross its Ts and dot its Is it needs some sort of paper trail, of course. A monarchist plot cannot be proved without the proper paperwork: red tape binds even the dirtiest of hands.

He can't do it here, you understand, he informs Lenin in a telegraph on April 7th. Tobolsk is loyal to the royal family; the guards themselves have gown soft; there are most likely monarchists among them, just waiting for an opening to hand the Romanovs through to their freedom.

That morning, out of earshot of the family, he takes Elijah aside. "Change of plans. Moscow is too dangerous at the moment; they'll need to go to Ekatarinberg. I've something in place already."

All of the telegrams which are sent from Moscow he carefully falsifies so they reflect this exaggerated truth.

Next day, Alix and Nicholas celebrate their engagement anniversary, which he personally finds very touching. Just look at them. Middle-aged, with five children and a war between them: and still do those fairy lights of youthful love grace their eyes.

It is on this same day that Nicholas learns he is no longer allowed to wear the epaulets that have been with him since youth; his son, too, is deprived of his own, and cries when they are taken. They have each had the initials of the other embroidered on them, Nicholas bearing his son's name proudly, and Alexei his dear papa's.

Little by little are men dehumanized.

* * *

The little tsarevich's health fails him once more, and the family suffers its first split: Maria, Alexandra, and Nicholas will be taken to Ekaterinberg ahead of their son and the remaining three girls, along with those loyal few friends and servants who have whiled away their entire captivity with them.

He boards the train with the distraught former tsar and his empress: to help them settle in, of course.

He spends the entirety of the train ride translating Gogol's 'Nose' into English- quite a relatable text, really; who among us, after all, has not found a nose in his bread from time to time?

There was one breakfast…but then, you know most of his stories by now.

* * *

On the highest hill of Ekaterinberg, opposite the Church of the Ascension, is a little low white house, well fenced in. Its cellar looks out onto Ascension Lane, between the branches of two trees.

Here is where he settles his brother's coffin, in a corner. He brushes his hair tenderly. He cups the white cheeks. He kisses the blank brow, unruffled by thought.

He leaves him alone, all alone there in his coffin, looking small amongst its pillows, far smaller than his exploits will have drawn him in your imagination. Our loved ones are never giants. We cannot keep them that way.

We cannot keep them anyway.

* * *

One final touch (you will enjoy this one):

The nearby monastery is the only friend to these lonely parents, fretting over their ill child, first in his absence and then again in May when they are joined by the rest of the family. Each morning, their new captors remind them how the mighty have fallen: before the sun herself has fully woken, Commandant Avdeyev bursts in to 'verify the presence of the prisoners'. All the windows are shut up as winter fades dramatically into sultry summer, and this itself is a lifelong struggle: just to open one window, to drape a hand over the sill and feel the breeze on one's soaked brow. Imagine an army once hopped to at the slightest gurgle from your throat, and now you have to beg permission to open a single window. It's enough to madden the gentlest of men.

But, oh, this monastery, what a true friend to the family, to the autocracy, army rations, no, dear Romanovs: cream, eggs, bottles of milk: these are the provisions fit for royalty.

And beneath the stoppers of one of those milk bottles, who should have slipped a little note, a little beacon, what little birdy flew in to deliver such tremulous hope, hmm?

Hope, hope, hope, hope, what a brazen thing: creeping in where it's no business at all.

See for yourself: it's like something out of a French romance.

"We are a group of Russian army officers," the first note tells them, in poor French, written as from the hand of an undereducated soldier (he particularly likes that touch: even Elijah doesn't recognize the handwriting). It is signed, "Prepared to die for you, an officer of the Russian army."

Nicholas establishes an open communication with this secret savior.

"Your friends do not rest. The hour we have waited for so long has come. With God's help and your presence of mind we hope to achieve our goal without risking anything," says the next note.

And the next: "One of your windows has to be unsealed so that you can open it. I beg you to indicate to me precisely which window. In the event that the young tsarevich cannot go, matters shall be greatly complicated…Would it not be possible, an hour or two before the time, to give the tsarevich some kind of narcotic? Let the doctor decide. Rest assured, we will not undertake anything unless we are assured of success."

Nicholas replies in all haste: "Second window from the corner on the square has been open for two days and even at night. Windows seven and eight by the main entrance are also always open. The room is occupied by the commandant and the assistances who make up the inner guard at any given moment. There are 13 men armed with rifles, revolvers, and bombs. The commandant and his assistance come in to see us whenever they like. The guard on duty makes the rounds of the house at night twice an hour…There is one machine gun on the balcony and another under the balcony- in the event of a disturbance. Opposite our windows on the other side of the street the guard is staying in a little house. There are 50 men. From each guard post there is a bell to the commandant's room and a wire to the guard quarters and other points. Inform us as to whether we shall be able to take our people with us."

He keeps the Bolsheviks apprised of all of this right under Elijah's nose.

How, how, could he not know, you will ask?

We love all the wrong people.

We give our heart to them when we should have kept it to ourselves after all. We believe in them because truth is relevant to all individuals: and if one cannot believe in the people he loves, he can believe in nothing.

* * *

Nicholas hammers the final nail in his own coffin. In his diary he faithfully records this incident with the letters. "27 June. Our dear Marie turned 19...The weather was the same, tropical. 26 degrees in the shade, and 24 in the rooms. It is even hard to bear!…Spent an uneasy night and kept vigil fully dressed. All this because a few days ago we received two letters, one after the other, telling us to prepare to be abducted by some loyal people! The days have passed, though, and nothing has happened, and the waiting and uncertainty have been very trying."

There is your monarchist plot.

He does direct a cracking good narrative, doesn't he?

* * *

But occasionally humans surprise him.

One night over tea, having reminisced about Alexei's impish childhood, the strawberry he once slipped into the toe of a lady's slipper, the forwardness with which he greeted foreign dignitaries, and having now fallen into a sudden solemnity, the tsar looks at him with those soft eyes.

The tsarevich is playing with Maria in the next room; there is an awful lot of clattering about; Alix is laughing. She knows, she believes: these loyal Russian men are coming for them. She has always staked her heart not in governments but in people.

"I am going to be executed," the tsar says to him, quietly, so his wife and his children do not hear. "I have ensured it. There is a spy in this house; he reads my diary. He'll discover that I have been formulating an escape with some monarchists, and they will kill me. When I die…when I die…" And here he looks toward the door, with such love in his face. "When I die, they will free my family."

Even the meek lamb has within him a core of steel, then.

"You are a good man," he says.

He does not say it lightly.

There are so few of those.

And to your great misfortune, Father Tsar, you have not confessed to one of them.

He sends the necessary proofs of this monarchist plot off to Moscow.

* * *

July 17th.

Elijah is moving about restlessly in the next room.

There is that strange tickling silence of those few minutes before midnight, when the previous day itches at you, and the next poises impatiently. No one walks easily at such an hour. Through this strange in-between Elijah paces. He senses something, no doubt. He wears the night uncomfortably: perhaps it sits on the nape of his neck, worrying the hairs there.

The tsar turns over in his bed: his sleep is troubled, but not enough to waken him, no, he will need to be jarred from his slumbers by rude hands. His little son sleeps like a doll, with the lashes dark on his rosy cheeks, the pale little body perfectly aligned on his cot. The girls lie in the moonlight like sweet hothouse flowers. Their mother regains her youthful glow in this restorative suspension.

"Elijah," he says, opening the door between their rooms, and letting something strange build in the atmosphere between them. It's no fun if the rabbit doesn't smell the wolf on his tail before he is eaten.

"I thought you should know," he says, taking a step through the doorway, and now from behind his back bringing out the dagger so that his brother understands precisely how serious is his situation. "I'm aware of what really happened in New Orleans."

"Niklaus," Elijah whispers, which is as good as an admission.

"You were very clever, brother," he tells him, and stabs him in the heart.

* * *

The guards are dragging the family from their beds. They are reassuring them: for their own safety, they must be removed from the house. The Whites are closing in on the city. There will be a truck.

There will be a truck, later.

As the family is herded down into the cellar, he drags Elijah after them; you can hear his knees bumping against the steps. Infernal knocking noise. The collar of his brother's jacket chafes his hand. He can smell the nearby gardens, heavy with that perfume which in summer is even more sickly.

Two of the guards carry chairs; Nicholas has asked politely for them. Neither Alexei nor Alexandra can stand while they wait for this truck. In fact, Alexei's knee is acting up again, to such a degree that his father must carry him down into the cellar. He presses his face into his father's neck; he is not fully awake. He is angry as only a child can be angry in such a situation: how dare someone jostle him from sweet dreams for something as trivial as an escape!

Kol, his coffin lid open, presides over this scene from the corner: he has compelled them all to ignore this oddity.

Elijah he wrestles into position to see it precisely the moment he opens his eyes. He is facing the Romanovs; they are arranged as though for a family portrait, Alexandra and little Alexei in their chairs, the girls round them, Nicholas smiling at his son, who has ceased to be angered by this abrupt change in his routine and is now frightened by it.

He undaggers Elijah when he hears footsteps on the stairs.

"Nikolai Alexandrovich, in view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you," one of them is reading off from a paper in his hand when Elijah awakens.

They always thrash when they first come out of it; he squeezes his brother round the waist. Elijah won't be any sort of match for him for a moment yet; all the senses need to settle back into the body, to feel out their proper places.

"What?" Nicholas asks, turning from his family. "What?"

"Klaus!" Elijah gasps, and grabs at his arm with a frantic hand.

"In view of the fact that your relatives are continuing your attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you," the man repeats, and one by one the rifles are lifted: in moments like these, you'll notice they take forever, ascending, ascending, and everything becomes supersaturated, the smells, the sights, those long black barrels with the human faces somewhere behind them, but where, where-

He stabs Elijah once more, twists the dagger; it does not enter his heart, but scrapes just past it, so that his brother draws a watery breath, slumps a little, tries to get his feet beneath him with such pathetic little flailings.

"Look at them. _Look at them!_ " he hisses into Elijah's ear, wrenching his chin up. "This is your family. _This is what you've done to your family_."

One after another, crack, crack, crack, the rifles are discharged, the cellar passes the reverberations back and forth, across the small room from one wall to another, and he jerks his brother up, he forces him to stand on his failing knees, he makes him watch first the empress and then Olga attempt to cross themselves, and fall with their rites half-completed, he jerks his face to the side so that Elijah can see Nicholas's torso explode, the boy's face spray a sudden jet of red, and all along, here he is, mumbling, "No, _no, stop_ ," and the girls, those bright little flowers, sweet young things, still white with sheltered youth, unmarried, virginal, there they are, the two of them, Maria and Anastasia, crouching against the back wall, cowering, covering their faces with their little hands, pleading whatever nonsense it is humans mutter in such moments to the nonchalant eyes of rifles.

"Was your little whore worth it, Elijah? You know I slept with her, and I can tell you she wasn't." He jerks him up when once more he slips.

"She tricked me. She tricked me, Niklaus! I didn't know she was working for father!"

"Yes, she does that, Katerina." He digs the dagger in a little deeper, just beside the heart there, making sure to nick it, so Elijah can live the vicarious agony of this sweet little foster family of his. "And you let me dagger Kol for it, you, dear, honorable brother, noblest of us all." He twists the dagger again.

Elijah vomits all over his shoes.

One of the executioners, finding that the little tsarevich is still alive, shoots him again, behind the ear.

He winds his arm round his brother's waist with the intimacy of a lover, pulling Elijah flush against him. "You better run, brother. Run, run, as fast as you can, and hope Father catches you first."

He drops Elijah onto the floor of the cellar, broken, that indignant spume of vomit and saliva on his lips, some sort of broken sob bubbling in his chest. He can't quite make it out: you'll have to speak up, brother dear.

Some of the Romanovs are still faintly crying out.

That is, of course, settled easily enough.

To your bayonets, men. Aim for their stomachs: trust an old soldier on this.

He takes up one of the rifles; it's always best to lead by example, wouldn't you say?

* * *

 **Alexandria, 2014**

Silence.

Silence.

Somewhere a clock is counting down, and a taxi's brake pads shrieking their final death howls.

But his brother is silent.

They do not look at one another: they are both aware through those little clues of heart and breath that they cannot. He has talked quite enough for now. Of course no one ever expects him to say this. He can spin on and on forever, and when one language fails him, simply jump to another.

Kol looks down at his hands.

He has a way of smiling, his brother. It's a pained thing which creeps out of him, which he must have stolen from the bottom of himself, where he has thought to slink away and die. The broad fingers, suntanned as they were when he died, stir amongst themselves. We always look for clues in our fingers, when our gazes can stand no other resting place.

Kol stares at his for a very long time.

He says, "You needed three hours of my life to tell me that you're a prat?"

But he has found what he was looking for: you can see this in his eyes when he finally raises them and they are not miserable, not wet, not grasping for other explanations, the way eyes do grope about in the faces which have disappointed them. "Did Bekah know that it was Elijah and not me?"

He takes a deep breath; he doesn't know why. That there are still mysteries to be plumbed for even him he assumes should perhaps be astounding; that sometimes he does things, he reacts certain ways, he feels those unconscious movements of the long-dead heart and did not predict these vacillations, he was not already one step ahead of himself, trimming back his own feelings to perfectly fit his current circumstances- this perhaps is a miracle. How can a man have so many corners he hides from himself? And he could argue this: he could say, you see how many other faces he has; he is, after all, still digging them up himself. Surely there is one among them, surely, surely- but let's be fair.

He has never been fair, after all.

"Yes," he says. "She knew. Not at first. In the beginning I told her that you had helped Elijah bring Mikael to New Orleans. However, you know Bekah: she soon sniffed out that lie."

"And she didn't even try to break me out, did she." He laughs; you can hear it catch in his throat. "The three of you are always going to choose one another. I knew that. I knew that. It's a wonderful racket, really: Elijah betrays you to Father, frames me for it, and once it's all unraveled, there I am, still rotting away in my coffin while he runs about doing whatever the hell he pleases."

"I did end an entire dynasty for you. You should have seen how many extended members of the family I hunted down and threw in a well- it took some of them days to die. And Elijah-"

"Shut up, Nik," Kol snaps. " _Shut up_. I don't bloody well care what you did to Elijah. How long were you going to leave me in there?" He holds up his hand. "I don't care. I don't need an answer. I have every answer from you I ever needed, I've just ignored them for nine centuries. Don't look at me like that," he says, and suddenly his face crumples. "You don't mean it. You think you mean it. But you're only sorry in this moment, because for a second something's reached your dead, black heart, and in a day it will be gone, and I can't keep chasing it. Good for Caroline that she's found it somehow and managed to hold onto it. Maybe in another thousand years I will too. But I'm not waiting that long again. I can't be that lonely anymore, Nik."

Here is where he springs up, dagger in hand, and sticks the little high and mighty brat through the heart. Here is where he cradles the idiotic head in his hand so that it does not strike the floor, and for a while he'll sprinkle pretty words over the corpse and wring his hands and beat his breast with lamentations.

But he doesn't.

There is a dagger, sewn into the lining of the thin jacket he is wearing, but he doesn't touch it. His hand waits limply on his knee.

Perhaps he can't be that lonely anymore either.

What, then, to say next?

Do not say anything, rather.

If you wait long enough, he will come to you, creeping in like a neglected pet who wants to be touched and does not know how to ask after something like this.

But Kol does not do this. He rises from the bed. His face is concernedly blank: nowhere can he see what he is to pry at, how he is to mold this situation into whatever shape he likes. "If you're going to kill me, Nik, do it now." And now his brother holds both arms out to either side and eyes him with such boldness, with such resolution, and he can only sit on this bloody bed, the nerveless hands still helplessly clutching his knees, such heat in his throat, such a great knot, that sad shriveled heart thundering within his chest. "Nothing, darling? How terribly boring. I thought at least I'd go out in a blaze of defiance." He lowers his arms.

You can brace and brace for these sorts of things, but a brother will always slip himself past that wall.

"In that case, let me make everything very clear to you, darling. Don't contact me again. I don't want to know how you're doing. I don't want to know how Caroline is doing. Elijah and Rebekah can fuck themselves in whatever way they don't enjoy. As far as you're concerned, I died on the Gilberts' living room floor. Fight a war with the humans; I don't care. Don't ever ask me for help. Don't ever ask after me full stop. I don't want to know what's happened to any of you. I don't want to know how it ends." He licks his lips; the shoulders jump a little. Something has hitched deep inside him. "Tell Bekah good-bye for me. You know I can't do it."

And then his brother is gone.

Of course you know he survived this, though it may not feel like it to him, to you: he has, as you well understand, no other choice.

* * *

"Well that's just sexist, gorgeous."

"It's _truthful_. Boys are idiots. And they're always boys no matter how old they are: that's part of the problem."

Enzo leans over her desk, smiling rakishly at her, just like every freaking man in her life. "If you can provide one example, I'll concede your point." He pokes one of her pens out of place; she straightens it.

"One? _Just_ one? Oh my God, I have _five hundred_." He moves another pen; she moves it back. "What about that one time- _stop moving my stuff._ Sit. Hands in your lap. Good boy." She points him into submission. He does settle into his chair like a good boy; he is so much more cooperative than Kol that it's not even funny. If you want to be really depressed: it's how he thinks he's going to be loved.

She sits back in her chair and steeples her fingers. It's kind of Klaus-like of her, but whatever. At least she's not, like, crapping the Iliad just to reminisce about this one time in the country of whatever she fought her twenty millionth war and it was good and many perished at her hand, blah blah blah.

"One example. You mean like that time I found you and Kol both competing to see who could fit more pickled sheep's eyeballs in their mouth, and then Tim slapped both of Kol's cheeks, and that stuff went everywhere?"

"I've never heard you scream that loudly." Enzo laughs.

" _It went in my mouth_."

"Maybe you should close it once in a while."

That's definitely uncalled for. She flicks her water bottle at him, splashing the collar of his shirt.

"There's your one example, jerk, but let me go on. What about when Kol discovered Vines and all he wanted to do for like two straight weeks, twenty four hours a day was film these ridiculous videos, most of which seriously, _seriously_ violated twitter's terms of services? And you guys got Tim drunk and I walked into his and Kol's hotel room to find him with his hat sideways, _rapping_. That was personally traumatic for me, and I have walked in on them having sex at least half a dozen different times, and they do some really, really weird stuff. Like, I don't want to judge, but there's weird as in you got a little drunk and you kinda' maybe somehow broke the sex swing and maybe someone was upside down at one point, and there's weird like internet porn kind of weird. They're the internet porn kind of weird."

Enzo never tries to not laugh; she likes that about him.

"And what embarrasses Kol is me walking in on them cuddling. _Seriously_." She throws up her hands. "So, one time, they obviously were not paying any attention, otherwise they would have heard me coming, so I go busting into their room because I had something important to tell them, and they're lying on the bed full on Eskimo kissing. And as soon as he notices me, Kol comes _launching_ off the bed like he's a normal person and I just walked in on him on the toilet or something. I mean, well, you wouldn't launch off the toilet, obviously, but like that kind of embarrassed. And he's all like, " _Caroline_!" like I haven't seen his penis in every state of being a penis can exist in? Oh!" She snaps up in her chair. "Tim's coming back tomorrow. I was thinking, banners, some kind of soundtrack- maybe a small, catered get-together afterward. I have not planned a party in seventy years. I was thinking we could surprise him at the airport with a-"

"Caroline," Enzo interrupts her, which means it's serious for sure if he's using her actual name and not some kind of smirky nickname that she pretends she hates.

"Kol's leaving. He's taking his man and splitting. We already discussed it, and congratulations, gorgeous: you get me in the divorce."

"Oh," she says.

She sort of knew this was coming.

She sort of knew: friends are not tangible. Your hands always pass through them just a bit, until one day you can't see them at all anymore.

But she still says, in this soft, soft voice, "They're both leaving?" like if maybe she could keep one of them. She thought that a lot, back in Mystic Falls: if she could have just one of them. But that's selfish of her: neither of them can stay, not here, not with Klaus breathing down their necks. They're going to be together, and they're going to be ok.

She has to ask him anyway, after staring at her hands for a while: "Do you think they'll be all right?"

Enzo smiles, and covers her fingers with his. "You mean, do I think the super-powered, immortal version of Heath Ledger's Joker and his heavily-armed, 123-year-old terrorist boyfriend will be all right? I assume that description sort of speaks for itself."

"I know that's stupid. I know I'm not their mom."

"No, no, no, no, Caroline. Caring about someone is never stupid. You might care for the wrong person. But _you_ were never wrong."

"I like that," she replies, smiling at him. "Especially the part about me never being wrong." There's a little bit of wateriness in her laugh, but that's ok. He's good at noticing those things, but not in a bad way: not in a way that makes you curl up inside yourself, trying to shelter it from him.

"All right then," he says, and presses his thumb into her chin. "Let's give them a private reunion then, yeah? Give everyone a chance to clear their heads. They won't leave without saying good-bye to you, I promise. Meantime: I'm going to go and have a poke at your beau."

She sighs. "Don't. If he rips your head off, I'm going to have to leave him, and then he'll spend the next ten decades sending me shitty jewelry apologies. I'm going to get the freaking Hope Diamond in my mailbox, like that's supposed to make up for killing my friends. How the hell have you _not_ had your head ripped off by him anyway?"

"Because you like me. See how the beast cowers in your presence, gorgeous?"

"Even I don't have _that_ much power over him. Did you guys used to be in love or something? Did _you_ bang him? Because, let me tell you, I am really tired of running into past conquests. And apparently he was a major slutball back in the day, so I'm sure I'm going to spend the next several centuries bumping into all the randos he's screwed over the course of the last twelve million years."

The door to her classroom opens; she jumps.

"Stop _doing_ that," she tells Klaus, who just freaking...materializes in the doorway. "You're like a cat."

"Apologies," he says as sincerely as he ever apologizes, which is to say with a double dosing of sarcasm and calculated hand posing. They're linked behind his back, like always; he's shown the same attention to his hair, and his shirt collar, and the necklaces that dangle with such precisely calculated panache, so that they touch the first chest hair you can just barely see through the open v of his Henley.

But she can always tell when his heart's not in it. He's probably always going to put himself through the motions: he will always bare his teeth, and go about overturning baby carriages. But there's something small in him, something sad, something disappointed, like the things that gather in everyone, these things he is supposed to rise above, these small human setbacks of attachment.

She keeps telling and telling him: you can't burn these things out. But still he's so disappointed in himself.

"Why are you always here?" he asks Enzo coldly, taking another step into the classroom. "Haven't you got anyone else? Oh, wait- that's right." He gives himself a self-congratulatory smile.

" _Klaus_."

"No, it's all right, gorgeous." Enzo twists around in his chair to face Klaus, keeping one of his hands over hers. "I'm glad you're here, mate. I wanted to deliver the good news in person. I know you've got some trying times ahead of you, for yourself, for your family, so I wanted you to know that I'm going to be here every step of the way with you. You know, mate, I've always considered you a sort of father to me. I don't know whose blood it was turned me, but I figure there's every chance it was yours, right? Accidentally bled into a soup pot, a canteen, etc. etc. You know how mucky things get during a war. Anyway, do you prefer 'daddy' or 'papa'?"

" _What_?" Klaus asks, going white with some sort of heretofore undiscovered supernova rage. "If Kol is actually going to leave, he needs to take _this_ with him. I taught him better than to leave his rubbish behind. Or didn't he want you? I can certainly understand that."

" _I_ want him," she snaps.

"You're young, love. You'll refine your tastes as you age." He throws himself down into a chair, hooking his leg over one of the arms, because he can never sit in a chair like a normal person.

"Really? So I could refine _you_ right out of my life?"

"I'm the obvious choice." He waves his hand at Enzo. "This is…the one-legged puppy you adopt out of that misguided goodness of your still mostly human heart. No one burdens themselves with something so useless for long."

Enzo, completely nonplussed, leans back in his chair, letting go of her hand at last, and lacing his fingers behind his head. "I was thinking, pops, I never learned to ride a bicycle. I never had one as a child. Sad orphan backstory; anyway. Since we're going to be spending so much time together, I thought you could take me under your wing, teach me everything you know."

"The fine art of shutting up, perhaps?"

She snorts. "He's not going to learn that from _you_."

Klaus gives her his bitchiest look; you cannot so much as tiptoe around a criticism of his many and varied speeches: he is this century's (every century's) prodigious Winston Churchill.

She rolls her eyes so hard she basically backflips out of her chair, and picks up a pile of tests to be graded, tapping them all into one perfect square. "I'm going to sit here and grade tests, and you two are going to be quiet, and not provoke each other, or kill each other, and Klaus, I can _see_ you smirking like, ok, sure thing sweetheart, meanwhile I'll just pop this little insect's head off when you're not looking, but I _am_ looking, and if you so much as mess up his hairdo, you're going to spend the next thirty years on the couch."

"Caroline," he protests.

" _Klaus_ ," she imitates, bringing her eyes up to pin him beneath her best did-you-just-drape-that-paper-snowflake-over-the-wrong-table death stare, and she gets this little thrill down her spine when he scowls, but he shuts his mouth, he sinks back in his chair, clasping both hands on one of his knees.

"Look at that: one jerk on the leash, and he stops barking." Enzo smirks.

"Enzo," she warns, but this is like the one single thing in which he is never inclined to obey, and so he leans forward in his chair, he wiggles his eyebrows at Klaus, he smirks so smugly that Klaus practically levitates out of his chair, half a second later he has Enzo by the collar of his shirt, there's that little yellow warning tinge to his eyes- and then she throws one of her pencils at him, and sticks him right in the forehead.

Klaus looks up in complete astonishment, how _dare_ someone penetrate the hallowed sanctuary of his murder, etc. etc., and slowly, so slowly, she rises from her chair like Venus breaching her sea. "What. Did. I. _Tell_. You?"

"He started it."

"You are _a thousand years old_. Put on your big boy pants and get the hell over it!"

The pencil is plucked from his forehead with as much slo-mo drama as he can possibly drag out of this single moment. He twirls it between his fingers, eyeing her with that particularly bitchy expression children get when they are deciding exactly how obviously they are going to defy their mother.

He stabs Enzo in the jugular with it. "Oops; I slipped."

She picks Enzo up and fusses over him extra long, just to piss off his Royal Bitchiness.

* * *

When Tim walks out of his gate, his head is bent over his phone; he's slowed down to text, and has let the other passengers jostle their way in front of him.

One of the big shoulders is sloped down under the weight of his pack; he rarely carries his rucksack normally, evenly distributed between both; it's always dangling off some bit or another of him. He's had a shower and shave (always hopeful, darling) on some leg of the return flight; the soap is still pungent on him. Something a bit sharp, a bit piney: all men want to smell like wood (insert your own cock jokes here, darlings), after all.

He feels his heart float up into his throat; he restrains himself from anything embarrassing. It's not grief one has to watch out for: it's happiness. It's very sly; creeps up on you when you least expect it. A burst of euphoria can ruin one's whole reputation; it's all right to brood away those rainy moods which are best matched to drizzly windows; try surviving an unrestrained leap into this oaf's arms.

But then, he doesn't need to concern himself with that anymore, does he? Nik is no longer breathing over his shoulder; his every twitch is not to be scrutinized and locked away in coffin dust should it not meet standards. If he is to sever himself completely, what he needs to do is begin to unlearn: Nik's reactions are no longer his Bible.

The hat comes up then; Tim is startled, just for a moment, and then he smiles. "What are you doing here already? I was just texting you to say me flight's early."

"I know. I was stalking it online. There are websites that track flights. Isn't technology amazing? Twice the stalking in half the amount of time."

Tim shoves his phone back into his pocket; it clinks against his watch. "It does let perverts like yourself operate a lot more efficiently. You missed me, didn't you, you sentimental gobshite?"

"No, I don't think so."

"You're a filthy fucking liar, is what you are, Mr. I-stole-a-new-bottle-of-cologne-just-for-this-reunion."

"How do you know I stole it?" he asks, pushing off the wall he has leaned his shoulder against for maximum casualness.

Tim gives him a Look; it is definitely a capitalized one, very judgmental, hardly Catholic of him. "Because you've never bought so much as a piece of soap in your life, you sticky-fingered bastard. Now come here."

When they kiss, he clutches at the back of Tim's neck. The arm not occupied in fighting off the rucksack which tries to swing round and insert itself between them slides round his waist, and pulls him onto his toes. Tim laughs a little self-consciously, and kisses his nose.

"You look better. A bit different," Tim says, now taking the arm from his waist and wrapping those great clumsy hands round his cheeks, and stroking behind his ears. "Less tired. Have you had it out with your brother?"

"Yes," he says, and he doesn't want to say 'nuzzle', that's rather maudlin, but he does pull away from those hands and _press_ his face, shall we call it, into Tim's shoulder, turning it so that his cheek rubs the worn material of his shirt, and with a subtle inhale taking in the soap, the splash of shaving cream he missed on the underside of his chin, that unique bouquet of each individual skin and the person who lives and moves inside it.

"I'm happy. That's what's different."

* * *

Later, in bed, he pushes his fingers through Tim's sweaty hair, he rubs at the little piece in back that always kicks up, no matter its various wettings and the expletively creative fist shaking of its owner, he runs his own cheek along the slightly damp jaw, and says into Tim's neck, "Can you believe we're here, in 2014?"

It feels like the whole world is bursting in him.

He forgets himself; he kisses the neck underneath his mouth, and the chest, the crook of Tim's arm: anything he can reach.

"No," Tim replies, and smiles up at him.

He kisses the smile too.

"It took us almost a hundred years, but we're running away together after all. I told you I would. And you thought I'd let a little thing like dying come in between me and disobeying Nik."

"I know we are, you big eejit," Tim says, and rolls them over.

* * *

She puts herself on strict lockdown, because she's decided: she's not meddling. She has to let Klaus come to her; she has to let the boys come to her. (She does keep an eye on Enzo, because he's really on this whole poke-the-Original-bear thing.)

She spends most of the next three days just wandering around her hotel room, reading, painting her nails, watching soap operas, because poking one curl on her head outside the window will probably be her undoing, she will smell the street foods shimmering on their grills and the exhaust baking on the streets and there will be this explosion inside her, the world bursts in on you like that, intrudes its sights and its smells and its textures and floats those long-lost ghosts of childhood wonderment from the grass you forgot to smell and the ocean to which you have been blinded, and next thing you know she'll have Tim on one arm and Enzo on the other and they're gonna' storm the city.

And she's going to forget that any hour, minute, second, one of them will drift in here and shuffle their feet and give her a handshake and say see you probably never.

She was only seventeen when she started out. She didn't know: that's what it's gonna' be. One long string of good-byes, one after another. That's what immortality is: it's all the things that were going to last forever in finite human hands. Teenagers are always immortal, but the really wonderful thing is, they only see life, they only see themselves lasting and lasting, and everything else a fixed point around them. Humans don't see anything happen until it does.

On the second day she's browsing MSN when that little red bar leaps suddenly to the top of the screen: **Breaking News, Riots In Portland** , and she pulls up the live feed to see everywhere people flourishing banners and breaking windows and pouring, pouring, pouring through the streets, born along on that mad river adrenaline, and when she squints and brings into focus the little indistinguishable blobs of lights which are the silver crosses they carry in their hands, she blurts out, "You _idiot_!" and rolls over for her phone.

But one deep breath and a clench of her fist and she doesn't pick it up from her nightstand after all, she decides, nope, no, she will yell at him later, she has plenty of time, one day when they are lying quietly side by side and he is not so ripped up by his brother, she will punch him in the chest and screech, "Hey, remember that one time _you started WWIII_?"

There are more riots on the third day; the whole word begins to shift, to uneasily eye their American counterparts, who are always quickest to protest, those fecking tea-wasting Yanks (she imagines Tim would say), their voices are shrillest, they carry the farthest- they want legislature now; they want government aid instantly- it's how her people are.

"Well, what can we do?" one interviewee says. "Just yesterday in Austin there was an attack- broad daylight, ten people dead. One of these animals just went through them like it was nothing. And the government wants to ignore this? They want to tell us it's just about radical individuals? They've done the same thing with the Muslims- the exact same thing, you know, and I don't think it's gotten us anywhere. Just a lot of dead innocents. So we're going to- we're going to keep hiding our heads in our, you know, a word I'm not sure I can say on television, and meanwhile we're going to keep paying our tax dollars for them to not do a damn thing, and these Muslims are going to run the show- you know, I think, I think this is probably those ISIS people. I think this is something else from them. Maybe they've taken those bath salts and now we've got all these drugged-up terrorists loose on our streets. And the government wants to cover it up and tell us they're vampires or something like that."

She jumps off her bed and begins to pace, letting it play on in the background, her youtube playlist slipping seamlessly from one video to the next, this slurry mélange of accents all whirling around and around and the carpet scrunching under her bare toes, the fibers tickling each supersensitive nerve and somewhere on the street the grills wafting in, wafting in-

And she stops and she clutches her hair and something that maybe should have clicked a while ago slots into her brain, makes a little ah ha! ding in that back recess where she files away the things she has not quite grasped but left to simmer for a while, gaining steam, gaining clarity, the way any problem does when you have set it aside for a while and in two days or weeks or years come back to it a better, wiser person, and aloud she says, "Goddammit."

Mikael is gone. Every megalomaniac wet dream of Hitler Jr. is now within his grasp. With no breath on his neck, with his father gone from his heels, with his terror lifted, his paranoia in slow increments easing and easing from his chest so that he has room to expand, so that his plots must not be kept to the insignificant minutiae of a country here and there with its small and crumbling government, when he doesn't need to sulk in crowds, when he can have a freaking _throne_ , when he can drape himself in the Queen's best jewels and ride her like a horse down Baker Street, waving to his supplicants, that Bombay _shitehawk_ , to borrow another of Tim's phrases, and she is Queen _Mrs_. Megalomaniac, _God_ -

He can just finger steeple his way from country to country, destabilizing all their governments, _he can do that_ , she forgets sometimes, because he looks at her like a puppy, he kisses her like a virgin, so terrified he is going to do something wrong, but this is literally the most powerful man in the world, this is a man with scant morals, with ample experience, how many societies has he whirled through, plucking threads here and there, helping them along to their inevitable descent, how many aristocracies has he himself kicked from their gibbets, how many kingdoms, how many rebellions, how many _downfalls_ has he precipitated just by whispering in an ear, and all this under his father's lurking eye, all this with death staring him down from somewhere, all this with discovery just a country or two behind him-

She needs to sit down.

No, no- she needs to pace.

She starts dictating her first in a series of lectures: First of All How Dare You is her working title.

"Klaus, you cannot take over the entire known world," she says, clutching at one of her curls, but that's no kind of argument with him, because there's really nothing he _can't_ do, and anyway, when you tell him he can't have something, he looks right at you when he breaks it.

She needs a bath.

Everything is clearer in a bath; everything more pure, simpler, somewhere is a world, but you have to grope for it, you have to part a veil, it is a job in and of itself just to bring these hazy gray people-shapes into focus and so you don't, you sink a little lower, you tilt your head, you shut your eyes. You feel the water move over you: an invisible sort of feeling, like living in your own skin, but then there's a slight disturbance, around your wrist, around your knee, and you remember, but it's a gentle reminder: shh, shh, the little ripples around your forearm seem to whisper. Go back under. And there's a breath of raspberry, vanilla, a hint of jasmine, you go back to drifting, drifting in some exotic pond not in this world, in some tranquil stepping stone between worlds, a wood between worlds, where the wilderness weaves in and out of the branches and is not forgotten by encroaching city complexes, and on this never-cooling water the stars sleep like jeweled carpets-

"Nice breasts, darling."

She screams.

She jolts up out of her raspberry foam, but that's not the way she needs to go, she ducks back under to her shoulders, flicking one foamy hand at him and screaming, "Get _out_ , Kol! Get out!" and of course he's just chilling on her countertop, swinging his legs, completely casual, like he hasn't just completely obliterated her sanctuary and peeped on her like a big perving _perv_.

"It's a bit too late for all that maidenly fussing, don't you think? I've already seen them. And anyway, it's not the first time I've seen them, so I don't know what you're so flustered about."

"I'm flustered that you just burst in here when I was having _private time_ and didn't even bother to knock and then spent I don't even know how long with your tongue hanging out of your freaking mouth like a freaking _caveman_! Didn't you live through decades when, like, chivalry was actually a _thing_? And, no, you _haven't_ seen them before unless you've been hiding in my closet and watching me change, which actually I wouldn't put past you."

"At any point in our entire association has it seemed like the chivalry thing took, darling?" He swings his feet and smirks. "And perhaps I haven't technically seen them before, but Tim has, and he paints a nice word picture."

" _What_? That little Irish _rat_! He's supposed to be _gay_!"

Kol shrugs. "He's only mostly gay, darling. Aren't we all."

She wriggles down into her foam, her heart mostly under control now, and there's this silence that falls, they both feel it, she can tell, and just like it always does, this surge of grief swamps everything.

He's dressed in jeans and a shirt, something he's stolen from Tim, it has a distinctly 20th century feel to it, rolled up at the sleeves, not tucked in at the waist as Tim would, but left hanging over his jeans because he has to flaunt even these minor conventions. His hair's been recently cut, the bangs trimmed back out of his eyes, the back tidied up, all his stubble scraped off, the bags under his eyes gone, and just…this enormous weight has been taken from him. And she can't be sad about that. She can't sit here mourning for something that was hurting him so much, in so many ways. You can't trap the people you love like that. Deep down in the parts of you where it's ok to be bitter and human and small, you can grieve for yourself, for your own feelings, for the parts of you that are bleeding somewhere.

But she can't shove that in his face. She can't say, stay, not for you but for me, because everyone has to choose themselves first. Everyone has to first and foremost take care of their own heart, not at the expense of others, but because so many, many times, it's been at the expense of yourself. That's what you have to remember: not at the expense of yourself.

"You could come with us, you know," he says.

"I know. I'm sorry."

He kneels down next to the tub so he can lean his elbows on it, and prop his chin in his hands. She doesn't flinch back from him; she does flick a little more foam at him. "Maybe you should spend the next one hundred years letting your boyfriend teach you about boundaries."

"Or perhaps I should spend the next one hundred years breaking down his own concept of boundaries. It's terribly boring. Do you know he'll probably knock politely when he comes to see you, and actually wait for you to open the door?"

"Horrors," she says dryly.

"I know, darling. I've trained him and I've trained him, and yet."

"Ok, well, don't beat all of his manners out of him, or else you guys are going to meld into this one terrifying Blob of Kol with some weird blurry Irish/English accent and like one half of your face will grow hair and the other won't and instead of having a little shoulder angel or Jiminy Cricket or whatever you want to call him, there are just two shoulder devils, and they're both having gay sex."

"I feel like this metaphor broke down somewhere."

"It kind of did."

"Also, Tim isn't my conscience, darling, if that's what you're trying to get at. Did you know he's wanted in at least half a different countries? He has a rap sheet that's as long as my leg: and that's just covering the 60s. I've never been so proud in my life. You nurture and you nurture them, and then your brother sticks you in a coffin for ninety years, and you just never know how they turned out." He clasps his hands together, and opens up a little hollow between the thumb and first finger, so he can rest his chin there. "I've left a present on your pillow."

"If it's a picture of you in some sort of compromising position, I don't want it."

"No, no, darling- that's hidden somewhere amongst your belongings. You'll stumble across it one day, and remember me fondly. Actually, I've bequeathed to you my collection of Nik's lousy poetry."

She gives this wild jerk, splashing foam up onto his chin, and nearly jerking her shoulders right up out of the water. " _All_ of it?"

He laughs. "There are bits of the original tablets on your pillow, and then coordinates to the others. I hid them round the world so Nik couldn't get at them. Some didn't survive, but luckily for you, I've memorized them all and written down the ones that didn't. Use them wisely. And by that I mean share them with Enzo."

She knows her whole squishy heart is in her eyes when she smiles, but that's ok. It's not bad to feel; Klaus forgot that. She won't.

She does sniffle a little, though. She's not trying to hurt him; it just breaks out of her. She grabs his face, gives each cheek that little playful slap when you're trying to scale down a moment, when you're trying to take the weight off it, but really what you just want- what you want is to hold them the way strangers can't, to remember what intimacy is, what it doesn't have to look like- it's never been about sweaty boot knocking, just humans, just touching one another.

He's struggling a little, she can tell. He holds it back at first, but then it's like he lets go of something. He still smiles through it anyway; she wonders how long he has before he unlearns that. She still hasn't: a smile is still what she reaches for first. It's easier to be hurt, to be inconvenienced. When you turn that around on someone you love, it lasts so much longer than anything that's pierced your own skin.

"Tim will be round sometime. He wanted to talk to you alone. He's probably going to blubber. You can tell him I said that."

She laughs and wipes her nose. "I will."

"Don't wait for something he can't give you just because you love him," he says, and of course he's not talking about Tim anymore, and when he reaches up to take her hands from his cheeks, his own are a little shaky, a little cold, he presses hers in them for a long time.

She can't believe she loves him so much.

Caroline Forbes and her long and questionable string of murder boys.

"Also," he says, leaning in more closely, an intimate distance, a kissing distance, but he doesn't do that, he smirks full on, right in her face, the biggest, smuggest expression she has ever seen, and he says, "You're welcome for the picture, darling. You'll definitely thank me when you find it."

And then he's gone.

* * *

Afterward, she sits for a long time on her bed, scrolling through all the pictures on her phone, seeing again Bonnie, her mother, and, oh, mom. Mommy.

She bursts into tears.

* * *

He is right kitted out when he taps on her door: the rucksack over his shoulder and the hat tip tilted just so, the dusty boots about to retire ungracefully at the toes; everything is Going Somewhere so they can dance round it.

Jesus Mary and Joseph, look at her, with the aureole of the recently departed round her head, everything shinier, all of the bumps of her smoothed off, the way people always become abruptly more precious the moment before you lose them. She opens the door a little cautiously, she knows what she's opening it to, then, and his throat gets a little slurry, something inside him says oops-a-daisy and tries to ruin his manhood right there on the doorstep, so he points the tear ducts desperately elsewhere, onto the boots with the sad toes, he got that patch on the right one from kicking some hoodlum up the arse, and there you go, boyo: hoodlum arses are nothing to burst the pipes over, so you see that cock is wrong after all: he doesn't blubber.

He steps into her room while she bustles off, throwing something over her shoulder, some long babble-stream of sorry about the mess and such and such was on the telly, and for the first time she picks the bras up off her bed and tosses them into the corner where they won't torment him.

They're after squaring off from one another then.

He squeaks out a hello. Clears his throat and tries again for something that didn't come from his dear departed ten-year-old self. The bollocks descended some 110 years ago, lad: try and have a grope for them, then. "Hello."

"Hello," she says and smiles, softly, softly, so. It breaks his heart. Wham in the stomach, and all the breath and the ache goes out of him so there's nothing for a moment, just himself free-floating, just that drifting when the heart has for a moment checked out, the coward.

Oh!" she bursts out suddenly, and spins round to the bed. "I got something for you."

She comes back with something in her hand: little black square with a coil of wire on top, and when she hands it to him, it's like she's christening something, there's such tenderness and ceremony in the pass over. "It's a Kindle. One of those e-reader things. So you can store thousands of books on it. I know you have to cycle them out of your bag because you can't carry everything all at once, and I thought this way you could keep all your favorites, no matter how much bag space you have. I already loaded a bunch of weird porn on it. You should see the kind of stuff Amazon has in their erotica section."

He laughs, and for a moment distracts himself with putting it in his rucksack. There's a tightness all over him, something big growing in him, and the voice has got a bit damp, so he doesn't test it yet, he lets the soggy bits of it just clog up his throat for a moment. She takes all the hurts of others inside herself, puts them on the wee shoulders when she's all full, and tisn't fair to throw his own yoke on top.

"So you're leaving today," she says, easing herself back onto the bed, and crossing her arms. Shrinks into herself a bit, the poor thing. It's all the holes riddling her right now, all the warm bits leaking out and just the cold grave air in their places. "Where are you going?"

"I don't know. I thought I'd just get on the train and get off somewhere."

"You mean 'we'." She looks up.

"Caroline."

She knows, so she does. It's come full into his face now, he can tell, gushed out of something.

"He's not getting on the train with me."

She stands up. "He said he was leaving. He left me Klaus' freaking poetry collection. Why would he change his mind all of a sudden? What did he say to you?"

"He didn't say anything. But he won't leave his brother, Caroline. And if his brother doesn't get him, his sister will."

Oh, she turns white, she does. She turns grey: all the mottled colors of grief. Bump goes his heart inside him; he wants to put his head on her little shoulder and bawl like a child. He gets the little choking in his throat when something is so inexpressibly unfair and you can't pull it out of you, you can't reach that deep, you can't unravel from the very bowels of you the hurting; it's taken up residence in all your nethers, hasn't paid the rent or anything, just cocked up its feet on the furniture and nicked your last beer from the fridge.

"Listen," he says. "When your man first turned me back in 1912, I spent three years on the outskirts of this family. They have each other. They might ruin each other, but they have each other. That's what matters to them. They don't pick other people over each other."

"Well he should pick you."

"He isn't choosing between meself and his brother, he's choosing between himself and his brother. And he'll choose wrong. He always does."

She sits down; it's like she can't contain all this standing. Things fall out of you when you're standing; you've got to curl round it. "But…I was ok with this because you guys were going to be together. I can be sad and move on because at least I know you're somewhere banging under a freaking coconut tree. What are you going to do by yourself?"

"I'll be grand. I'll be grand," he repeats for both of them. "I've been alone most of me life."

It doesn't comfort her; she looks worse. She looks up at him like he's just the wee saddest thing she's ever seen. "But that doesn't make it ok. That doesn't make it any…easier. Just because loneliness is something you've gotten resigned to doesn't make it _grand_." She clasps her hands together, palms them against one another, looks down at them for an answer. "And you can't just…stay?"

"If he doesn't get on the train, I will."

He crouches down in front of her. He wants them to be at a level for this. He wants to let all the things trickle out of him in little controlled spouts, so she has the truth for herself, but he hasn't slopped it on her, he hasn't just stuck himself in the heart and fountained directly onto her. "I can't. I can't, I'm sorry. It's not you, all right? It's not you, Caroline. I won't say anything against your beau. But I can't. I only wanted Kol, not the others. But I can't slice off bits of him and keep them for meself. I can't tell him not to go back." His voice breaks a little, so he stops, reaches for the watch in his pocket, click click clicks the anxiety from his fingers, back and forth and back and forth he flicks the lid, the ache in him growing and growing like any good-bye, and he puts his other hand on her knee, not without some wrestling within him, no, but he puts it there on the knee and gives it a squeeze and tells them both, it'll be all right, sometime. 'Sometime' is a grand far-off thing, all young and springy, full of itself and all those promises it may or mayn't deliver, but sure it sounds nice now, 'sometime', yes, that's when it will happen, and meantime 'sometime' can put up his boots and while away all his months and his years just as he pleases, biding his time, biding his time, because it's what's expected. He's crouching somewhere, waiting to pop from the shadows, he can decide at any moment, now is 'sometime', here ye are, and then out he lurches to scare the bejaysus out of you because it's only you'd given up hope of him, you'd stopped looking round your heart and stopped peeping round corners because 'sometime' is so bloody easy to stop believing in when a grief is new in you.

"I'm not gonna' cry on you this time," she says, and wipes at her nose.

"Ye can if ye want to."

And so she does and so he holds her, slow rock a bye of them both where he just sways them gently back and forth saying shh shh and she doesn't flood him this time, she has a good quiet cry, holding onto his shoulders, which he has on good authority are good shoulders, and he squeezes his eyes for a moment and plot twist, as one certain eejit might say: he doesn't cry.

She says, "I'll take care of him," and he tells her no, no: you'll take care of yourself.

And so saying he puts her gently away from him and gets to his feet and like his mother before him on his first day off to primary she glares the tears from her eyes and tells him, "You be so, _so_ careful" and wants to know will he call her if he ever has any problems, anything, anything, and he lies just like she wants him to, of course he will, and then it's time for the letting go, it's time for her to clutch at him for an extra second, and then to be fair, to loosen her claws and follow him not with some storm of tears will erode the already softened bits of him, but just a quiet 'good-bye'.

He pauses halfway down the hall and presses the heel of his hand into the bridge of his nose, as if it'll help.

For a moment he cries like he's just discovered it.

Then one more press of the hand into his nose and the rucksack adjusted on his shoulder and down the hall he goes, out into the sun where Kol and Enzo are waiting for him.

* * *

Enzo sees them off. "Good luck, boys. And don't do anything I wouldn't do."

"That's a bit limiting," Tim says, and pops his eyes like an owl when Enzo lifts him off his feet in a bear hug.

The bags are collected, Tim's from his forearm where it's slid during Enzo's exuberant good-bye, his own from the curb. They all look at one another for a moment, Enzo's hair shining in the sunlight, Tim's hat a bit lower over his eyes, where it must have got knocked loose by Enzo's parting back slap; he feels the springing in him once more, as when one has the whole vast green promise of his summer holiday rolled out before him.

"Well, darling," he says to Enzo, and hoists his favorite baseball bat over his shoulder. "Make me proud."

He takes out his phone once he's got Tim turned round and pointed toward the train station (he's lingered to shake hands with Enzo, holding himself together quite manfully, top job, darling, cheerio, as his predecessors might say), and now out from its little speaker there explodes a great collision of notes, all of them tumbling over one another, the crashing of symbols, that jaunty joining of the strings, everything blending into that one smooth stream which will carry along the listener, faster, faster, till he has begun to taste the adrenaline in his heart quite without noticing it.

"What is this?" Tim asks.

"The Pirates of the Caribbean theme, darling. Did you live under a rock while I was dead? It's our adventuring theme. Gets your blood up."

"You don't need a theme song for everything, eejit."

"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that, otherwise I might have to reconsider running away with you."

One of the big clumsy hands slaps at his rucksack. "What have you got in this? It's lumpy."

"They're your books."

Tim stops for a moment; it's very detrimental to their theme song. "Come along, darling," he says, and clicks his tongue. "You're ruining the song. It's more of a charging into battle song, not a standing round song."

"What do you mean they're me books?" Tim asks, not moving. There's always someone who ruins it for the whole group.

He throws his arm round Tim's shoulders; it's where he wants it to be anyway, touching the warm neck, the soft nape hairs, that old shirt worn thin at the seams which hints in that billowy phantasm shade at the skin beneath. "Books. They're square things with thin cardboard covers, and then some sheets of paper in the middle, with words on them." He pulls them both down the sidewalk, in high style, if you ask him, darlings, this giant's awkward progeny with his handsome boyfriend dragging him along by the neck, like a dachshund bossing about its owner, that catchy tune jangling along in the background, and from the dachshund's owner a stream of inventive if not terribly malicious cursing which the nearby mothers must guard their children's ears against.

"I took the books you left behind," he says, suddenly unclasping the neck and whirling round in front of Tim, kissing him on the mouth not so lingeringly that he can respond, but not so quickly that the mothers can keep hold of their children's ears rather than their eyes. The pasty face is somewhat dumbstruck; he kisses it again. He could go on doing this for centuries. He has centuries to go on doing it. He's never felt that way before: he has only ever felt the years behind him. "I took. Your. Books." He taps the tip of Tim's nose with his finger. It's a nice nose, a little turned up at the tip, freckled at the bridge, but faintly, so no one who hasn't clasped the face in that intimate distance where the two breaths mingle, and the foreheads are practically touching would have even noticed them. He kisses the freckles. "You were mooning over the ones you had to leave behind because you couldn't fit them in your pack, so I put them in mine. I had to leave out a few pairs of trousers, but that's all right. I don't intend to be wearing trousers often, anyway."

Tim laughs.

For a moment it sounds like something he's had to pull out of him, something which has been got at sharply, there's a little give in its middle, and you can see this in his face, you can see for a moment that perhaps the laugh isn't quite a nice thing, perhaps it's had to tear something to be freed.

But then the hat is swept off his head and Tim snaps it in his face, and down the sidewalk they pelt, the music chasing them all the way, both elbows going akimbo, nipping first one ribcage and then the other's; he trips half a dozen pedestrians with his bat. He counts at least seven headlocks which are distributed almost evenly between the two of them (he's playing fair; mostly; occasionally), and when this dulls, he says, "Race you the rest of the way. No cheating. Human speed only," and he punches Tim in the stomach, quite a wind-up, you may be sure, one of the hands catching him briefly by the shoulder while the mouth guppies stupidly and dribbles a few base words he won't repeat.

Tim chases him to the opening of the train station, where they both halt; he's laughing. A great big hysterical laugh, full in his belly, rather fizzy in his throat, a laugh you could float away on; he has to grab Tim for a moment, to hold himself up with one of those broad shoulders, pouring his mirth into it.

Man's languages have so many words for grief, and yet when it comes to his happiness, he is speechless.

He never thought leaving Nik was going to be like this. He never thought it was going to be something lifted off him. It's not for nothing the weightiest slabs are the ones we must grapple all our lives, trying to peep a toe out from underneath them, and yet never knowing how we are suffocating. He loves his brother in every tense: he has loved, loves, and will always love him. Nik need not wring his hands over that. But it's not something that should kill you. It's not something you should toil away in day after day, wandering in lonely crevices and terrified of those lonelier still which must lurk somewhere outside these ties of birth and blood. He had so many excuses; you always, always want to believe differently. If we can't be loved properly by our own family, what random stranger will in his heart separate us out from that senseless beast humanity, and pluck us from its midst?

He's calmed a bit now, and leans back so he can look up into Tim's eyes, which he has looked up into a thousand countless times and here it is again new for him, he feels leaping between them some invisible current as led him softly by the nose in 1915, when he sat down next to this strange boy on his stool and something wiser pressed him and pressed him, till they were somehow in one another's arms. His foot scuffs the ground a little of its own accord, suddenly shy, unable to determine where it ought to be placed. The hands too are numb with a fumbling awkwardness as he looks into the long-lashed eyes and the hat hanging in its rightful place and all those little wayward pieces of hair that creep out from beneath the brim.

"Let's ride the train as far as it goes and just get off wherever it stops."

Tim smiles. "Sure."

"And then afterward we'll find our way to Anguilla and lie round naked on the beach all day. I did forget several pairs of trousers, after all."

"Sure," Tim says again, and touches the dimple in his chin. He does it lightly, with just the tip of his thumb, pressing for a moment and then letting his hand fall away.

"Well, darling," he says, sweeping his arms wide, and with an elaborate bow indicating the train. "Shall we?"

And then he spots his sister.

Bekah is sleekly groomed as only Bekah can be, every strand beaten into submission, her lips and cheeks glowing, the face polished with her latest washing up so that what you have before you is some living Venus, terribly white, terribly otherworldly, the eyes hard and old as museum marble.

She'll have something dramatic up her sleeve; Nik is not the only one who demolishes entire cities just to ensure they have noticed him. She'll throw the train at him, perhaps.

"You were just going to leave without saying good-bye to me, you prat," she says instead, and begins to sob.

And then she snatches up a nearby family's luggage and begins to chuck it at him piecemeal, shrieking at him in various languages, not so their astonished audience is deaf to her private lecture, but because she cannot find in mere English an adequate outlet for her rage.

A child's rucksack goes sailing past his ear, nearly beheading Tim. "Get down, darling," he says, and heaves it back at her.

"You're making a scene, darling," he tells her, catching a trolley case and tossing it aside so that it clatters loudly but with no further harm onto the ground. "And you wonder why I left Nik to handle these festivities."

"You care about a bloody _scene_!" she screams, having run out of the family's baggage and now seized a nearby security guard who has his gun snatched from his holster before he can quite register that a shrill blonde woman the size of his large toe has just successfully overpowered him. The station dissolves into chaos; those mothers who in such horror shielded their children from the traumatic sight of homosexual kissing are now faced with an even worse threat (if only just). They snatch up their little sons and daughters and duck behind whatever man or building protuberance is available as Bekah opens fire.

He lets her shoot him a few times, just to take the wind out of her sails; once she's drawn a bit of blood, she'll settle.

The bullet in his left thigh is rather painful, though; it's grazed the bone, and mangled one of the few pairs of jeans which he didn't find it necessary to leave behind in lieu of Tim's library.

"Are you quite done, darling?"

"No. You can't leave me. You can't _leave me_ , you prat!" she sobs, and having squeezed this out through everything she is choking on, Bekah drops to her knees and buries her face in her hands.

She looks so small kneeling there.

He looks back at Tim, who has crouched behind one of the benches and now seeing her subside is straightening up from behind it, the rucksack in his hand. He knows, he knows, oh he knows that some invisible tether is still between him and Bekah, that what has most terrified him has suddenly and dramatically come to pass, that after everything he has endured to escape Nik, still in the end he can be taken by his hand and led back to them, cowed.

Don't do this to him, darling, _don't do this to him_ , not now when he has scrabbled for it, when he has bested death and bested his brother and somehow come through it not beaten, not lonely, but so free, as though unshackling himself from mortality never did it, unshackling himself from the bounds of human limitations never did it, neither of these mean any man or monster is truly limitless when his soul is not his own, but Bekah, Bekah, he wrestled it away from Nik, and Nik was _going to let him go_.

Nik was going to let him go.

She lifts her eyes and she's ruined her makeup, the hair is all ruffled up on one side of her head, the gun has fallen from her hand, she says, please, _please_ , and he looks once more at Tim, who has already decided how this will end.

"Go on with your sister," he says. "It'll be all right. If it's me you're wavering over, it'll be all right. I've ridden a train or two by meself."

"No." He hears how that catches, how it's not any sort of answer at all, but merely something that's been spit up instinctively, by the places in him his waking self cannot parse. He swings the bag down off his shoulder, and sets it on the ground. "I'm going to leave this right here, ok? Ok? I'm going to leave it right here, and I'll be back for it. Just wait here for me. I'll be back. I promise I'll be back, Tim, I do, I promise. Wait right here, ok? Please? I promise it's the last time you'll have to wait for me."

Their fellow travelers are slowly beginning to crawl out from their hiding places, and the security guards to gather their stunned wits. He seizes Bekah by the arm before they can converge on her, still looking at Tim. "Tim. Please, Tim. I'm coming back."

"I know you are, eejit," he lies for them both.

When he's wrestled Bekah off out of sight of law and man, he takes her face in both his hands. "You can't do this. You can't do this. It's the 11th hour, darling. It's too late."

"I want to come with you," she sobs, wriggling into his chest, so that he can feel her nose through his shirt, wet with tears.

"No." He's said it: he's said it. If he holds out his hand and calls softly to it, his resolve will creep back.

"You can't leave without me. You can't leave me here. _Kol_." She says his name like it's something she has savored all along, and he pushes her back a bit, takes her face in his hands once more, shakes her, bloody _shakes her_ , and she doesn't protest or rip his hands off her cheeks but only goes on crying, and in between hiccups sobbing out, "I want to come with you!"

"I don't want you to," he says.

And this shuts her up, this nails the mouth, dries the eyes, stops everything for a moment so that she is only there between his hands, barely breathing, blinking at him as though he has struck her, and now they are both caught in this awkward aftermath, wondering how to proceed. "What?"

"I don't want you to come with me." He takes a deep breath, says it again: "I don't _want_ you to come with me, Bekah. There were so many times you could have come with me, and you didn't. And now it's too late. I died, darling, and you got over me. You'll get over me again."

That has stuck something new and bristly into her; she tears up all over again. "No I didn't- no I _won't_ -"

He firms his grip on her cheeks, so she can't nod her head forward once more onto his chest, which perhaps will be the undoing of him.

"You're not Nik. Don't do this to me. Don't hold onto me because it's too painful for _you_ to let go, Bekah."

Her whole face crumples; she's never hidden her shame as well as Nik. He strokes her damp cheeks with his thumbs. They rest their foreheads against one another, and a shudder passes all through her, till he can nearly hear her bones clacking against one another. He keeps his eyes shut: there are some things you just cannot look upon.

"I don't want you to go off hating me," she breathes into his neck, a bit more subdued now, the tears still in her voice, but muffled so he can stand them.

"I don't hate you, darling. Now stop your hand-wringing; that's Nik's style. It doesn't suit you."

"But why didn't you come and say good-bye to me?"

He runs his hand down the back of her head, all the way through those carefully looped curls, calculated so they hit each little curve of her body at those precise trajectories which will draw every eye near and far. "Because you're the only one who can talk me out of it. And I don't want to be talked out of it."

She heaves a deep breath, and then settles into silence. For a moment, they are still as only creatures like them can be still.

And then he unwraps himself from her and he says, "I've forgiven you, darling. In my unsurpassable generosity, I've even forgiven Nik. But forgiving doesn't have to mean staying with you."

She grips him by the arms, digging in with her nails, but he gently peels her off and takes a step back, toward the station, toward Tim, and in a tone of voice that won't crush her, he says, "Be happy, Bekah."

Her face spasms; one of her hands darts out to twist in the hem of his shirt, to feel what little of him he will allow her to touch, to hold on for that one extra moment which is present in all good-byes. "Be careful, you idiot."

He tweaks her nose.

She slaps his hand away.

He vanishes back toward the station.

* * *

He is lying in his bed and staring at the ceiling when Caroline lets herself into his room.

In the streets, in the air, fall is with its cooling breath reviving the limp tourists, the cooks muttering over their grills, the barge captains who in summer must concoct as many excuses as possible to pop out onto the bow, where the breezes waft in their unspoiled virginity onto the moist throats.

"Rebekah just called. Kol really left."

His hands are folded neatly across his breast. Inside him, there stirs nothing, not even the usual warm rising which greets every hint of her voice. He stares without seeing onto this vast white ceiling.

The bed dips where she has obviously seated herself beside him, but this he does not see either.

"Are you going to go after him?"

"No."

"Good. That's the right answer. Do you think Elijah will?"

He blinks, and yet still the ceiling lies before him without detail, a flat thing, colorless, no texture to it, perhaps never-ending. "Elijah is on his way, but he'll leave Kol be. It was always my job to chase down and punish any dissenters, you know."

"He wasn't a dissenter, he was your brother," she says quietly, and this past tense at last sticks a knife in him, the ceiling swims, the finger on his right hand which here and there has given a small twitch now spasms against his chest.

"We have a lot to talk about when you're feeling better, Hitler II. But I won't bring any of that up right now." There is a soft clap where her hands land explosively on her knees, and the bed obligingly jumps a bit. "So. What happens next?"

He swallows hard.

Here the ceiling blurs more, and the entire hand is now engaged in clutching at his chest, where reside all the things he wants to dig out. In his throat is the sudden swamp of that thing which so seldom he has been victimized by but rather turns instead against his victims. Before him is that sepulchral void fear, which it seems he must step into, and give himself over to falling.

"I don't know. I don't know, Caroline," he admits in some cracked and wavery thing which surely is not his voice.

The bed dips once more, and then the soft head settles back on the pillow beside him, one of the hands comes out and slips itself over his own, and for long hours he will lay like this, speechless, with the girl beside him, and the unknown before him.

* * *

The security guards have- but for those requisite few who patrol the station at its most peaceful- cleared off in search of his sister, and slowly the station begins to live once more with the shouts of children and the jolting of luggage wheels.

He rounds the train toward the bench where he has left Tim, his heart for a moment shrunken and miserable inside his throat: it would be just like fate to have taken this from him. She's rather a bitch like that.

But there he is, there he is- sitting quietly on the bench, his legs stretched out in front of him, a book which he is not reading in his lap, both their bags between his feet. He has pulled the hat low over his eyes, and is wholly absorbed in this task of not reading; one of his legs is bouncing as it always does when something is nibbling at him. He has got one hand deep in his pocket.

"Look up, darling," he says, smiling till he might burst with it. "I'm trying to make an entrance here."

The head snaps up.

Wide-eyed, Tim lays aside the book and stands, snatching the hat from his head.

For several silent moments, he wrings it between his hands, really mashing the poor thing, trying and failing so many times to say something which properly fits a moment like this.

"Well, I'll be fucked," he gets out at last.


End file.
